Making it in Massachusetts
Reports of the death of manufacturing here, and across the country, have been greatly exaggerated. There is no going back to our industrial heyday, but a new study says manufacturing has a solid future in Massachusetts. In fact, one of the biggest concerns is a possible shortage of trained workers.
By Michael Jonas | Commonwealth Magazine | October 11, 2012
When the great recession battered employment across the country, manufacturing jobs—already on a decades-long slide—took a big hit. In Massachusetts, of the 300,000 manufacturing jobs the state had in 2007, nearly 50,000 disappeared. But a new report on manufacturing in Massachusetts has some good news amidst the recession gloom.
The study, commissioned by The Boston Foundation and led by Barry Bluestone, dean of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, found that manufacturing employment in the state has largely stabilized since 2009, while the sector’s productivity and output have increased markedly. Add to that an aging manufacturing workforce, and the report projects that there will be 100,000 job openings in the sector over the next decade. Indeed, one of the major conclusions of the study, based on a survey of about 700 manufacturing firms and interviews with nearly 60 company CEOs and managers, is that the state must ramp up its education and training pipeline to ensure an adequate supply of skilled labor to meet the looming employment demand.
The report is a follow-up to a 2008 study, titled “Staying Power,” which was completed just before the recession began pummeling manufacturing. “Manufacturing in Massachusetts has survived the Great Recession and, if anything, appears to be in a better position today than in 2007 to prosper into the future,” says the new report, “Staying Power II: A Report Card on Manufacturing in Massachusetts 2012.”
The encouraging news comes amidst a wave of national attention to manufacturing. Studies suggest we may be at an important pivot point that is changing longstanding assumptions about the inexorable decline of manufacturing in the US as industrial activity explodes in China and other lower-cost economies. A report issued last year by the Boston Consulting Group projects that, by 2015, fast-rising wages in China, huge productivity gains in the US, a weak dollar, and other factors will combine to “virtually close the cost gap between the US and China for many goods consumed in North America.”
The federal government has launched an advanced manufacturing initiative, and the state followed suit last year with a Massachusetts-focused effort aimed at boosting the state’s high-end manufacturing industry. In September, in conjunction with the release of the new Northeastern University report, state officials announced a new promotional campaign to make young people, schools, and families aware of opportunities in manufacturing, where the average worker earns $75,000 a year.
The report was released in September at an event attended by Gov. Patrick and other state leaders at AccuRounds, an Avon-based precision manufacturing firm. The company is owned by Michael Tamasi, a leading industry voice involved in efforts to sustain and grow manufacturing in Massachusetts. Bluestone, meanwhile, has more than just an academic interest in American manufacturing. He grew up in Detroit and his father was top official in the United Auto Workers union.
I sat down to talk about the future of manufacturing in the state with Bluestone and Tamasi at the Dukakis Center offices. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.
— MICHAEL JONAS
COMMONWEALTH: When talking about the manufacturing sector here in Massachusetts some people might say, “What manufacturing sector?” Give us a sense of manufacturing here today.
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