An article in Sunday’s New York Times magazine, focused on lithium-ion battery makers in Michigan, does a nice job of laying out the many factors involved in creating manufacturing jobs for Americans. In “Make or Break,” author Jon Gertner describes prevailing business models that discourage the slow-return, incremental investments needed to bring new factories into being. We read, too, that federal interventions that might support job creation face numerous cultural obstacles: small-government (my word, not his) political trends have long made federal “industrial policy” a distasteful topic for politicians. Well aware of those trends, President Obama (whether savvy or timid, depending on your point of view), turns to “stealth” distributions of federal stimulus money for industrial start-ups like the battery makers’.
Interestingly, Gertner writes that Michigan firms hoping to supply an emergent hybrid car market have begun to purchase and copy advanced battery technologies from their Korean counterparts. “Cutting and pasting” production techniques from abroad is not a new approach for American businesses (Samuel Slater famously brought foundational British textile technologies to America in the 1790s, but unsung thousands of enslaved persons brought technical skills and knowledge to the colonies well before that, fostering the commercial production of furniture, metal and woodworked goods, medicines, and much more), but it is not one we see explored in print very often. …our Yankee Ingenuity-slash-Egos being a bit delicate, perhaps. A bit more systematic respect for “other” sources of innovation might be in order, as the Michigan firm owners seem to understand.
Gertner mentions, too, the training courses being offered by some local colleges to folks hoping for employment in Michigan’s new lithium-ion battery plants, but (not surprising to readers of this blog) notes that the future for these factories is still unsure.
Gertner doesn’t go into detail on many of these points. He seems to be aiming instead to convey how messy and complex the situation is, which I appreciate. But in a sense, that lets him skirt the moral urgency of the debates he describes. So here’s a thought experiment. What would this article look like if written from the perspective of people who need jobs? Maybe the off-putting economic and political risks, and the distaste that influential Americans have harbored for government intervention in recent decades, would look different if we all felt the urgency of job creation that unemployed Americans feel every day. With that felt necessity, the government and we voters might push for more stimulus money for manufacturing, more boldly and openly deployed. With some centralized oversight and federal backing for these priorities, the aims of real security, decent pay and safety for workers could help shape the jobs themselves, too. The fledgling ecology of high-tech manufacturing is “fragile,” according to Gertner, and I believe him. I would add: we can nurture it to sturdy maturity if we really want to.