Ron Potter

Image Source: Peetje2, Creative Commons

I remember reading an editorial written in a very prominent newspaper about the loss of manufacturing jobs. The editorial was well written and was very fact based. It was questioning the wisdom of allowing another country to dismantle the very equipment required to support the local textile industry, ship it to another country where they paid a much lower wage and then ship the finished goods back at a much cheaper price than could be produced locally. The author was wondering if it were wise to let our desire for cheap goods supplied through a large retailer destroy the very manufacturing that was the base for much of the country’s economy.
In the news recently was the fact that the local textile industry lost a half-million jobs in 2007 and is expected to lose another half-million jobs in 2008.

The first editorial was written in England in the late 1700’s about the textile industry setting up shop in New England, America. The recent news article was written about the job loss in India as the textile industry moves on to cheaper parts of the world like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Has the textile industry been the early indicator of manufacturing shifts around the world since the time of the early Egyptian empire? Maybe all of the hand wringing about the loss of our manufacturing base is simply a natural evolution of global manufacturing cycles that have been in place for hundreds or thousands of years.

There are a couple of things I find fascinating about this shift and loss of jobs. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan so I’m very close to the US Auto industry. At the same time that we are experiencing this loss, General Motors and other manufacturers are searching for highly skilled engineers and innovative mechanical minded people to keep up with the complex design and manufacturing end of their business. And with the adjusting of the US dollar on the world markets, it is now becoming cheaper to do complex manufacturing in the US than it is in other parts of the world. What I worry most about all of this is the complete failure of our public education system and the diminishing numbers of US students attending our higher education systems. In an era when graduating from High School, going to work in the manufacturing sector and experiencing a nice middle-class livelihood has just come to a crashing halt, we need to be fixing our education system so that we can better compete in a rapidly changing global economy.
More on “The Concept Economy” next time.