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The
U.S.
economy has added more than a quarter
million net new jobs in the last three months, and recently
posted its strongest single quarter of growth in almost twenty
years. Even the
much-maligned
Indiana
economy
has managed a modest 19,000
job gain since July, with a modest pickup in average weekly
hours and other forward-looking economic indicators.
Does this mean that the economy will fade from prominence as
a campaign issue?
Don't bet on it. Political
rhetoric has a way of bending and flexing to fit whatever new facts
may arrive. You can be
sure that even if a torrent of new hiring propels job totals to the
stratosphere in the coming months, they won't be the kind of jobs
that make everyone happy, especially in
Indiana
.
That's because very few of the net new jobs created are
likely to be manufacturing jobs.
In communities across the state, there is a palpable discomfort,
even distrust, with any pattern of growth that does not embrace
factories and assembly lines. That
much is easy to see. We
mourn the all-too-frequent loss of these production-oriented jobs,
and celebrate the happier -- and relatively rare -- occasions when
new plants arrive, and rightly so.
Those jobs have a significant impact our economic
livelihoods, both individually and collectively.
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What
is harder to understand is precisely why so many of us still cherish the
notion that manufacturing in general -- and large scale, mass
production-oriented manufacturing in particular -- is the key to our
economic salvation, when the path of economic growth has been telling us
otherwise for almost two decades.
Since the mid-point of the 1980's, almost three out of every four net
new jobs created in the national economy have been in white collar
occupations -- managers, professionals, engineers and other knowledge
workers -- most of whom make more money than production workers.
Indeed, the single, most important explanation for the steady
deterioration in
Indiana
's average
wages relative to the national average is the failure of our state
economy to participate in this growth.
At the community level, at least, a preference for manufacturing over
other types of jobs is a little easier to explain.
Indeed, in an economic developer's version of Sophie's Choice,
where one must choose between 100 factory jobs and, say, 100 engineering
jobs at a software company, there is much to be said for the former.
Factories are familiar, are more likely to employ local people,
and their plants and equipment make great additions to the local
property tax base.
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And
in a state that is the most manufacturing-intensive in the country,
factories "plug in" to the rest of the state economy better
than many other facilities might. The
customers and suppliers of an auto parts company in Bedford are more
likely to be in its own back yard than, say, those up- or downstream of
a testing laboratory or an engineering consulting firm, increasing its
economic footprint.
But the game these communities are hunting has become increasingly
scarce. In the national
economy, manufacturing jobs have been on a downward trajectory for 24
years. The 100 manufacturing
jobs a community succeeds in attracting must run the twin gauntlets of
job-thinning productivity improvements and cut-throat international
competition every year.
Indiana
's
manufacturers are, by necessity, world class competitors, but the forces
that make them so will always restrict their payroll growth.
That same necessity forces all of us to wake up to the reality that it
will be growth in the production of services and knowledge, rather than
physical products, that will put bread on most of our tables in the
future.
Patrick M. Barkey
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