Economic Development and Emerging Technologies
Committee
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October 26th A Jobs Creation Commission is the place to hash out what the problems are and the possible solutions - That is the main advantage of having a special commission and it needs to bring in people from various sectors of the economy. In fact, I think it might be a good idea to expand it beyond the proposed bill to include some members from specific industrial sectors such as health sciences, information technology, finance and private higher education as well as representatives from areas that involve the quality of living which is key to attracting people. That would include a representative that would represent urban areas and problems; one that would represent health services rather than life health sciences, and so on. I come from academia and there the strategy is - the more minds you can bring to a problem, the better the discussion and, very likely, the better the solutions as well. We have lost roughly 20% of our manufacturing jobs in this last recession. That is not new. We have lost 50% of our manufacturing jobs since probably about 1980. And we lost as many manufacturing jobs in the decades since WWII to 1980. So, this is part of a trend and certainly that magnitude is not related to NAFTA. It is related largely to increased competition, first, within the country in the post WWII era, but also now, globally, even if we did not have NAFTA. It is also largely due to productivity gains in manufacturing and that will continue into the foreseeable future. I expect that our manufacturing workforce will not be larger in the future than it is today. It’s future is probably one still of slow decline, at best, over the coming decades. But in the absence of technological change and productivity, the decline would be much more rapid than it has been because we would lose out in competition. That said, manufacturing is still providing on the order of three hundred and fifty thousand jobs and they are good paying jobs. They pay much higher than the average job in our state. There is a continued bright future for the production of manufactured goods in this state that will be focused on developing new technologies and applying them to new products. So, our state can stay at the forefront of developing those new products. Even traditional manufactures in metals and plastics are a key sector because they are supplying components to the information technology sectors, to the medical device sectors and other areas of the economy. We can keep a significantly large manufacturing sector in this state but it is not one that is expected to grow in terms of employment. |