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Making It by Daniel Gross
This bit of legerdemain highlights a long-term trend. Even in the nation’s industrial heartland, it is getting harder and harder, relatively speaking, to find U.S. made goods – and the workers who make them. In 1940, when the U.S. was poised to become the world’s Arsenal of Democracy, about 27 percent of the U.S. workforce was engaged in manufacturing. By 2002, as the chart shows, that proportion slumped to less than 12 percent. To the unions that successfully organized manufacturers,
and to manufacturing advocacy groups, these are foreboding statistics.
In June, The Council
of Manufacturing Associations released a report by economist Joel Popkin.
It argued that if the U.S. manufacturing complex slips below a critical
mass, the nation’s economic, technological and political might
would be sorely eroded.
To be sure, the decline in manufacturing has hurt many areas of the country. Amtrak passengers traveling from New York to Washington can’t help but notice the poignant sign in southern New Jersey: “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.” But the industrial revolution, having transformed the U.S. from a nation of farmers into an urbanized, highly-productive industrial and service economy, has found its way to Mexico, and China. And as evident by our mammoth trade deficits, it’s the world that makes while Trenton and the rest of the U.S. take. But are we collectively worse off for this development? Manufacturing’s losses have been the service sector’s gains. And, by and large, service jobs are less dangerous and offer better working conditions than the steel mills and auto plants of decades past did. A perusal of historian Douglas Brinkley’s new history of Ford, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003 (Viking) paints work on the Ford assembly lines as tedious, mind-numbing – an ergonomic nightmare. Meanwhile, measures like home ownership, equity ownership, productivity, income, and economic growth have continued to rise steadily over the past 60 years, even as manufacturing jobs declined. Henry Ford, whose fierce desire to escape the drudgery of farm work led him to invent a car for the masses and forge a new manufacturing culture, was himself wistful about the economic paradigm of his youth. The creator of the nation’s car culture spent portions of his later years creating Greenfield Village – a scrupulously detailed recreation of a late 19th-century town to which his marvelous invention had yet to arrive. Daniel Gross is editor of STERNbusiness. |
n January 2003, President
Bush traveled to a trucking firm in St. Louis, Missouri, to promote
his economic
program. But his advance staff encountered a problem. All the boxes
of goods waiting to be shipped bore block letters reading “Made
in China.” An aide quickly covered up the offending words with “Made
in U.S.A.” signs. 