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In Our View: Making Some Good News

U.S. manufacturing grows at a robust pace, but sector faces challenges

The Columbian
Published: September 6, 2014, 5:00pm

While it is easy to get dazed and confused amid the constant swirl of economic news and numbers, we’ll try to keep this simple: The fact that U.S. manufacturing is growing at a robust pace is good news.

A report last week from the Institute for Supply Management indicated that manufacturing grew in August at its strongest pace since early 2011. As the Associated Press reported, “The boost from manufacturing has helped offset slower homebuilding, a slowdown in consumer purchases, and weaker spending on utilities and other services.”

While manufacturing is just one facet of a complex economy, it has been one of particular concern as the nation wriggles its way loose from the Great Recession. Many a pundit has proclaimed that while the job market is improving, the gains largely have been in low-paying service jobs. Many an observer has noted that while wealthy Americans are doing well, the middle class is shrinking. And many a displaced worker has mentioned that while the economy is recovering, this nation rarely seems to make anything these days. Manufacturing holds the key to unlocking those problems, often providing decent wages for jobs that don’t require a master’s degree.

Americans long have been proficient at making things, and making things long has been the foundation of the world’s most productive economy. While the world needs baristas and dishwashers, a proliferation of such jobs does not provide a strong foundation for a sturdy economy.

Locally, while Clark County is not particularly reliant upon manufacturing jobs, growth in that sector has been evident. As The Columbian’s Aaron Corvin reported two weeks ago in the wake of the latest jobs report: “The region’s manufacturing sector, thought to be hurting for some months, was revised from being down 100 jobs over the year to being up 500 jobs since July 2013.” The importance of that on a national level is explained by Brian Jones, a senior economist at Societe General in New York. “The manufacturing sector is just on fire right now,” Jones told Bloomberg news. “You’ve got increased demand for workers, and the more people are working and the more money they are making, the more money they’ll spend.”

It’s a simple lesson in Economics 101, and yet concerns remain. As Lydia DePillis reported in The Washington Post, the notion of laboring in a factory in a manufacturing job holds little allure these days. What once was viewed as an honest, hard-working path to prosperity exudes little glamour.

“It’s typically clean and sanitary, with robots to do most of the heavy lifting and powerful machines instead of belching furnaces,” DePillis wrote. “But that image hasn’t translated to the young people looking for jobs in a tough economy — or perhaps, more importantly, their parents, who might have learned from hard experience that manufacturing jobs disappear and a four-year college degree is the only sure route to the middle class.”

All of that will present an ongoing problem as the nation remakes itself during this economic recovery. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to other nations and the automation of jobs that have stayed here has lent an air of insecurity to the manufacturing sector. No longer can a solid blue-collar job be considered an unbroken path to a secure retirement.

Because of that, the issues surrounding manufacturing in the United States are multipronged. Companies must have customers to buy the things they make and workers to make them. The solutions will be crucial to the recovery, but for now there is some good news.

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