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In my last column, we looked at the reasons why U.S.-made products resonate with consumers. Studies found a preference for U.S.-made products when concerns about quality, safety and durability were high.
Studies show that Americans prefer U.S.-made products, and that this preference can help bring manufacturing back home. But can we turn consumer preference into purchases?
More than 170,000 new U.S. manufacturing jobs were announced in 2017 as a result of either reshoring or foreign direct in-vestment (FDI). That's an increase of 52 percent from 2016 and an incredible 2,800 percent from 2010.
Numerous pundits have forecast that U.S. manufacturing will follow the path of agriculture: Automation will replace human workers and steal all of our jobs. It will be an automation doomsday. Clearly, returning jobs will be, on average, higher skilled and fewer in number than when the work was lost offshore years ago. However, in reality, automation is key to reshoring and thus to U.S. job growth.
In January, President Donald Trump traveled to Davos, Switzerland, to speak at the annual World Economic Forum (WEF). His message: "America is open for business."
The United States is facing a crucial workforce skills gap. For more rapid reshoring to take place, we need a more highly skilled and larger workforce.
For the past several years, the Reshoring Initiative has been helping manufacturers reshore production or keep existing work here through total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. However, calculating TCO is only part of the overall competitiveness equation.
In his August 2017 editorial, “Tariff Debate Pits Producers Against Consumers,” chief editor John Sprovieri clearly posed the dilemma of low-priced Chinese steel imports, which have severely impacted the U.S. steel industry.
