While preparing for a recent trip to Ecuador, my wife and I spent hours practicing conversational Spanish. Once we got there, however, it became painfully clear that old dogs couldn’t learn new tricks.
On Feb. 21, West Coast port employers and their union reached a tentative five-year agreement on a new contract. The pact concludes a nine-month standoff that resulted in significant slowdowns at 29 ports from Los Angeles to Seattle.
The U.S. manufacturing workforce is among the most productive in the world. U.S. manufacturing productivity (measured as output per hour) increased 2.5 percent in 2014, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
During the past month, I interviewed several engineers for an article on automatic screwdriving. Along the way, I learned a bit of wisdom that is applicable no matter what process you might want to automate.
In the latter part of the 18th century, the advent of water and steam power enabled manufacturers to transition from manual production to mechanized production. Historians know it as the Industrial Revolution, but let’s think of it as “Industry 1.0.”
If a federal agency helped reduce the trade deficit, increase U.S. manufacturing jobs, and returned a profit to the Treasury, you might think that was a good thing. Unfortunately, it’s not the case in topsy-turvy Washington.
In August, the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) opted to delay implementation of a new “factoryless goods producer” classification in the latest revision of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
It’s a national tragedy that too many young men these days lack father figures, role models or any sort of guiding hand. Ac-cording to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 million U.S. children, or one in three, live without a father. In 1960, just 11 percent of American children lived in homes without fathers.
Good news: America is now luring as many factory jobs back from overseas as it’s losing to continued offshoring. That’s the assessment of the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit group that encourages companies to move work back to the United States.
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