The Vital Role of American Manufacturing

For the first time in years, there seems to be a lot of attention on American manufacturing—its comeback, its importance, and its value. Reshoring is bringing business and jobs back to America, and U.S. consumers are making the conscious choice to buy American. With the upcoming American Made Matters Day® on November 19, we can all do our part to further the cause and support the industry and our economy.

The idea of having a homegrown economy that can support the goods that exist here is an important part of our country’s past, present, and future success—it’s a sustainable endeavor.  Our economy grew out of an era of industrialization, bringing us a great deal of new innovation and technology that helped spearhead the manufacturing sector in the U.S., and also afforded us the opportunity to invest in the sciences and technology. As a result, new skills and capabilities were created in the workforce, which in turn reinforces domestic employment and entrepreneurship.  Vibrant economies have to be built upon a balance of goods and services. For the U.S. economy to continue regaining ground and once again  thrive, manufacturing needs to be a substantial piece of America’s financial pie.

For a variety of reasons there now seems to be a growing disconnect between those who have been in the manufacturing industry for their careers and those who are dismissing it as a career or just breaking into it. As a national priority, we need to find a way to make manufacturing more appealing to the younger generations; we need to reinforce training the next generation and getting them excited about producing high quality, regionally produced, and sustainable goods and services; simply put, we need to  take charge of reinventing manufacturing with the goal of bringing it back to America as a driving force to revitalize and reshape our economy and our future.

While outsourcing isn’t happening at the pace or persistence as it once was, it’s still occurring. Part of rebalancing the economy and adding value in new jobs is looking at the outsourcing equation and questioning how efficient that is. , With a population of 7billion and climbing our earth has limited resources and the cost and supply pressures are being felt in a global economy. While outsourcing may have made economic sense at one time, today we are realizing there are a great deal of inefficiencies, waste, and financial loss. As a result many businesses are focusing their efforts on creating a more sustainable economy. Having American made products is an economic motivator that helps support the economic security of the future and helps empower our youth into high impact and high value careers. From a personal point of view,  we at Harbec do business globally and domestically, but we are very interested in U.S. based manufacturing—developing new technology to become more efficient while having a regional aspect to our work, and helping America to reinvent the notion of manufacturing as a key aspect of its economy.

Want to know more about how Harbec and others are working toward reinventing America’s industrial future through sustainable manufacturing? Check out the exclusive three-part Manufacturing Sustainability series on ThomasNet. The series focuses on the market drivers shaping the future of manufacturing, how small manufacturers like us have created lasting value from investment in sustainability, and how organizations can maximize their impact and return-on-sustainability by investing in, and integrating, people and innovation.