Call it what you will—reshoring, insourcing, repatriating, onshoring—the movement toward manufacturers expanding production on U.S. soil has established itself as a trend, according to a survey by MFG.com and Reuters. MOJO, the MFG.com blog, reported: Forty percent of...
Manufacturing
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German Giant Says Skills Gap Results from Education Weaknesses
On Monday, the Financial Times ran a story about the skills gap, provocatively titled "German Giant Says US Workers Lack Skills." Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens, the German engineering group, said the problem exposed weaknesses in education and...
Energy and skill we can “ill afford to lose”
At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, I was dashing down a hallway at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Home in Hyde Park, NY on my way to deliver a lecture for SUNY's Empire State College when a painting on the wall stopped me in my tracks. "Art of the New Deal" celebrates the...
Change Is a Group Sport: Growing Manufacturing in the US
Did you catch Howard Wial's recent piece in The Atlantic? In it he outlines "four things [beyond trade policy] federal and state governments should do to encourage more U.S. manufacturing that is innovative and provides good jobs for less educated workers." In...
What We Invent and What We Build
Finally, some new attention paid to the crucial role that making things and hands-on work have played, and must continue to play, in a sustainable U.S. economy... On Friday, President Obama spoke from a G.E. plant in Schenectady, NY. “Our challenge,” he said, “is to...
“America needs an industrial policy” says brooklynbadboy on Daily Kos
My dad is a mechanic specializing in Porsches, and I grew up hearing him rave about the German car maker's fine craftsmanship and engineering. Could that be part of why I liked brooklynbadboy's Daily Kos post "America needs an industrial policy" so much? After a brief...
Making things with metal
The intro and the music might be a little cheesy, but I do love this video, Elements in Action, about the uses of iron, carbon, nickel, and aluminum that was produced by the Metals Service Center Institute, a 100 year-old trade association supporting the North...
Fireboat heading into port one last time
For an engineer on an old fireboat that came back to life after being sold for scrap, this Boston Globe story by David Filipov, about an aging fireboat that "has responded to thousands of distress calls in its half-century of service" and is now poised...
Blue-Collar Jobs in Demand in 2010
Check out this Yahoo! story about highly-paid blue-collar positions with openings in 2010: "Ready for a career change but dread getting another desk job? Then how about trying your hand at, well, working with your hands? 'There is a blue-collar...
Project H Design: Emily Pilloton brings hands-on work to under-served community
I just discovered Project H Design, a nonprofit team of designers and builders "engaging locally to improve the quality of life for the socially overlooked," whose "long-term initiatives focus on using design to improve public education experiences, spaces, and...