Manufacturing Jobs

The Sun article by Jamie Smith Hopkins on unemployment ("Mismatch between jobs and seekers," April 17) was excellent. However, the decline in manufacturing was an area that was not emphasized enough as a cause of unemployment in Maryland and the United States. Students graduating from Maryland high schools that are not college bound have no place to turn to for good paying unskilled jobs. The steel industry barely exists. There are no shipbuilding jobs available, and there are no clothing manufacturing jobs around either.

ON THE SITE... Suggs says Achilles injury 'not as bad as some thought' : Ravens linebacker expects a four- to six-month recovery from partial tendon tear after undergoing successful surgery Tuesday. Closing arguments expected in election fraud trial :  Julius Henson is accused of orchestrating a 2010 Election Day robocall that prosecutors say attempted to trick black voters into staying home from the polls. Baltimore area has high share of high-tech manufacturing jobs :  A Brookings Institution report classifies 27 percent of the region's manufacturing jobs as "very high-tech," compared with 16 percent nationwide.

General Motors Corp. has chosen its White Marsh plant for a new effort to build electric motors, and on Tuesday it laid out plans for an expansion that will generate 180 much-needed jobs and provide a boost for the hard-hit manufacturing sector. The automaker, which would become the first car company to produce its own electric motors, announced that it plans to start making the devices in 2013. The company is investing $246 million, including state funds and federal stimulus money, to construct a new 40,000-square-foot facility next to the site where workers now build transmissions, including some that go into hybrid vehicles.

The molten metal pouring from the foundry at Danko Arlington Inc. in Baltimore harks back to the early industrial era. But across the street in one of the company's other buildings, workers operate an X-ray machine, a laser probe and a 3D printer that seems plucked straight from science fiction. "We're trying to do pioneering things here," said John D. Danko, whose grandfather started the company 92 years ago. He's not alone. A new study suggests that manufacturers in the Baltimore region are disproportionately high-tech - and calls on leaders to build on local strengths, rather than writing the long-shrinking sector off as a dying field.

The molten metal pouring from the foundry at Danko Arlington Inc. in Baltimore harks back to the early industrial era. But across the street in one of the company's other buildings, workers operate an X-ray machine, a laser probe and a 3D printer that seems plucked straight from science fiction. "We're trying to do pioneering things here," said John D. Danko, whose grandfather started the company 92 years ago. He's not alone. A new study suggests that manufacturers in the Baltimore region are disproportionately high-tech - and calls on leaders to build on local strengths, rather than writing the long-shrinking sector off as a dying field.

Aluminum products maker Alcore Inc. intends to consolidate its headquarters and manufacturing operations in Harford County and hire about 120 new employees by early next year, a move that will nearly double its work force.Just as importantly, the company's planned June move represents the first significant step in a drive to expand Harford's manufacturing employment base, after years of landing some of Maryland's largest distribution centers."Alcore enhances the county's reputation as a place for manufacturers to be," said Paul Gilbert, director of the county's economic development office.

CHRISTMAS CAME early in far Western Maryland. A remote mountain region hit by decades of plant closings soon will be home to a manufacturing plant that could employ 800 people. The proposed ClosetMaid plant in Grantsville marks a stunning turnaround for Garrett and Allegany counties, which worked closely with state officials to close this deal. The number of plant jobs is higher than the number of residents on unemployment in Garrett, Maryland's westernmost county. There's more good news.

When Wall Street economists confidently predict that the nation's economy will grow quickly next year, and when they tout the rise in Americans' income, they inevitably overlook people like John Krieger.The Annapolis engineer lost his $75,000-a-year job last spring at Digital Equipment Corp., where he had worked for eight years in computer operations and marketing. Just a few years ago, he could afford a $12,000 sailboat; these days, he's collecting $223 weekly unemployment insurance checks.

MOORESVILLE, N.C. - Factories just like the Matsushita plant here made North Carolina an industrial colossus less than a decade ago, the state with the largest percentage of its workers in manufacturing jobs. Surrounded by fountains and landscaped nature trails, that pristine compressor factory seemed to embody the state's economic promise when it opened with fanfare in 1991. But North Carolina lost 27,800 manufacturing jobs last year - by far the largest such loss in the country - and the trend continued recently when the Matsushita factory's Japanese owners announced that they would close it this month, putting 530 employees out of work.

For a city defined by old-guard manufacturers, the fast-approaching end of General Motors' assembly plant in Southeast Baltimore is highly symbolic. But it's no turning point. The transition from old to new is over, even if the pain is not. A steady loss of manufacturing jobs since the 1970s has forced the region to transform from blue-collar hub to service-sector center, a place where the largest employer is the Johns Hopkins Institutions instead of Bethlehem Steel. That sea change in a generation has affected nearly everyone because it accelerated the city's decline, pushed people and jobs into the suburbs, put a premium on college degrees and redefined the political landscape statewide.

Suddenly, manufacturing is back -- at least on the campaign trail. But don't be fooled. The real issue isn't how to get manufacturing back. It's how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren't at all the same thing. Republicans have become born-again champions of American manufacturing, especially given crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio. Mitt Romney says he'll "work to bring manufacturing back" to America by being tough on China.

Lion Brothers is outsourcing again. Unpaid child laborers will design one of the Owings Mills company's newest embroidered emblems. That's a good thing, in this case. If the factory of the future is about fast turnarounds on custom orders produced close to the customer, Lion Brothers' new Girl Scout badge is a small but telling indicator that U.S. manufacturers might have a place in the global economy after all. President Barack Obama's blueprint for reviving American factories should help retain and perhaps create manufacturing jobs at the margins.

Gov. Martin O'Malley has convened a special session this week to redistrict the congressional maps in Maryland. The news out of Annapolis says that we will not see a "jobs bill" or any other bills to bolster Maryland's economy during the session. If true, the failure of Annapolis to act to reignite Maryland's economic engine in this time of malaise should be part of the first sentence of an indictment charging our state legislators with abdicating their responsibilities. Americans - including Marylanders - distrust and question big institutions.

When free trade proponents sold the American people on the idea of the North American Free Trade Agreement, they promised that it would be a boon economically. Evidence, however, suggests that it has been anything but. Since NAFTA's implementation, Americans have dealt with stagnating wages, outsourced jobs, increased illegal immigration, an influx of contaminated products and rapid environmental degradation. By 2008, according to EconomyInCrisis.org, NAFTA had cost America nearly 3 million well-paying manufacturing jobs, 3,000 family farms, countless businesses - and with them tax revenues - and billions of dollars through trade deficits.

Your recent editorial regarding poverty ("The nonworking poor," Sept. 18) should be required reading for all members of Congress who are gainfully employed with great benefits. The mere fact more and more of their constituents are living in poverty, becoming homeless, and receiving no medical benefits is totally inexcusable. Why do these disturbing conditions exist? Because jobs, mostly in manufacturing, have gone and continue to go overseas. Our middle class is and always has been reliant on manufacturing jobs as the locomotive of a prosperous economy.

More than 20 percent of my Baltimore factory's sales are exports, and we want more. We ship to 35 countries; however, that is not good enough. Developing new markets to sell our sheet metal fabrications, wire baskets, and wire forms to new markets will grow jobs in Baltimore and strengthen my company's base. That's why I accepted an invitation from Gov. Martin O'Malley to accompany him and other Maryland officials and business leaders to Asia in June. This trip was a startling eye opener for me. I came home shocked with how advanced our economic rivals are. My major observation is that we have some very tough, smart, aggressive competition.

BP Solar warned state regulators Monday that it will close what remains of its Frederick operation and lay off 58 employees, starting this fall. The company's decision to shut the solar-power facility, cutting research and development jobs as well as sales and marketing positions, came after it relocated the manufacturing operation there overseas. BP announced in March 2010 that the site would lose 320 manufacturing jobs as a result. The remainder of the facility will close by March of next year, with layoffs beginning in October, said a BP Solar spokesman, Pete Resler.

It's called Chesapeake Bay Candle. But for 17 years, all the products in the signature line of Annapolis-born and Rockville-based Pacific Trade International were made by cheaper labor in Asia. On Tuesday, the brand celebrates a sort of homecoming: the official opening of a new plant in Glen Burnie, where a workforce projected to grow to 100 will make the candles the company sells at Target, Kohl's and other retailers. Pacific Trade International is one of a small but growing number of U.S. manufacturers that are bringing production back from overseas.