Tesla Finds Home in Nevada

Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of American electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors.

Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of American electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors.

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — Tesla finds home in Nevada! Gov. Brian Sandoval announced Thursday that Nevada won a high-stakes battle with four other states for Tesla Motors’ coveted battery factory, but the win comes with a hefty price tag — up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives over 20 years that state lawmakers still must approve.

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The Return of 'Made in America'

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4/11/2012 | Written By Anthony Mirhaydari, MSN Money


For all our problems, the stage is set for a renaissance of US manufacturing. That’s largely because our dollars are worth less and our pay is shrinking. 

Clearly, something’s still wrong with the economy. By the metrics that matter to most people, the Great Recession has not ended. Employment, retail sales, industrial production, home prices, most of the stock market and real incomes are all below their 2007 peaks. Food stamp usage is at a record high and rising.

But something’s going right, too. And I want to focus on that this week.

American competitiveness is back, albeit largely because of the pain we’ve endured. Our dollars are worth less, and real wages are lower. Corporations are responding, with new factories springing up and manufacturing jobs blooming like flowers welcoming the spring. Overall, the U.S. has added nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of 2010 — the first period of significant growth since the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, the costs of producing goods overseas, and getting them here, are rising. Workers in places like China are demanding more, and oil prices make shipping costlier.

Experts say these trends are likely to continue.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch researcher John Inch wrote in a recent note to clients that the “U.S. economy is in the early stages of a long-term manufacturing renaissance.” Analysts at the Boston Consulting Group add that rising wages and other forces have steadily eroded China’s “once-overwhelming cost advantage as an export platform for North America.”

Thanks to higher U.S. worker productivity, as well as supply chain, cheap energy (natural gas) and logistical advantages, the BCG team says that by around 2015 “it may start to be more economical to manufacture many good in the U.S.”

In short, we could be on the cusp of revival of “Made in America,” with workers paid good wages for building things again. And for the millions in the army of the unemployed, it can’t come soon enough.

Silver lining to storm clouds?Don’t get me wrong. Our problems still run deep, and I’m not saying happy days are here again; I’m merely pointing out one of the few silver linings to be found.

We’ve long been too reliant on credit to supplement stagnant wages — and that’s left the West with an $8 trillion debt hole, according to Credit Suisse calculations. This fueled two bubbles and a financial crisis, and it resulted in the pitiful “recovery” we’re in now.

And so far, if the economy is reviving, most workers aren’t sharing in it. Real, inflation-adjusted wages have fallen in three of the past four months. This has never happened outside recession before. So it’s very possible we’re following Europe into the depths of a new downturn.

Last September, I argued that “the real recession never ended” and that, in reality, it started a decade or more ago as labor participation peaked in the late 1990s. We’ve been sliding lower ever since, trying to compensate for a lack of high-quality jobs and stagnant pay, with voodoo stimulus efforts out of Washington and an extreme, inflation-igniting easy-money policy from the Federal Reserve.

The core problem has been a hollowing-out of America’s manufacturing base because of increased globalization, the manipulative trade policies of China and others, and rapid technological change.

Washington, of course, hasn’t done anything about trade or jobs (except talk, of course). But the U.S. economy may find a way out of the hole anyway.

The depth of the problemBefore moving on, it’s worth remembering that something similar has happened before.

In many respects, the current situation resembles the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and the Long Depression, a global downturn that lasted from the 1870s through the 1890s. Replace the robber barons with hedge-fund managers and multinational CEOs, and the agitation over the Free Silver Movement with the Tea Party and the debate over the Federal Reserve’s stimulus efforts, and the similarities are striking.

The downturn was preceded by a period of global economic integration as steam power, the telegraph and railroads made the world smaller. Workers lost jobs to technology and foreign competition. The banking system was rocked by the panics of 1873, 1884 and 1893, driven by real-estate bubbles and stock speculation.

Our current role was played by the United Kingdom, an aging sovereign struggling to maintain its role as the world’s superpower. The role of the upstart United States is now played by vigorous up-and-comers like China and India. Check out this excerpt from A.E. Musson’s “The Great Depression in Britain, 1873-1896: A Reappraisal“:

“Britain was losing her technological lead; she was failing to modernize her plant, to develop new processes, or to modify her industrial structure with the same rapidity as Germany and the United States — owing to conservatism, the heavy cost of replacing old plant, and deficiencies in technical education.”

In other words, the British got lazy, making them vulnerable. We have the same problem now, and I outlined in “Are American workers getting lazy?

The other part of today’s problem is that America’s free-trade policies put U.S. workers at a disadvantage, because trade partners aren’t playing fair. Beijing actively manages its currency’s exchange rate — accumulating trillions of dollars in reserves in the process — in an effort to ensure the country’s export-oriented growth isn’t threatened.
In this environment, research by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that our economy will suffer if we don’t erect defensive trade barriers and tariffs.

Musson wrote that there was little doubt that a stagnation of British exports was “one of the most critical aspects” of the downturn and that aggression by trade partners was a primary cause. It’s the same for the United States today.

He writes: “Foreign trusts also adopted a vigorous policy of ‘pushing’ their goods abroad . . . while foreign industry and trade were greatly assisted by protective tariffs, export bounties, ‘drawbacks,’ and special low rates of rail transport. British business, on the other hand, had no such fiscal protection and assistance in this Free Trade era.”The result was a rise in calls for reciprocity and “fair trade.” It was argued that for Britain, as for the United States now, it would be ruinous to remain an open market when competitors were strongly protectionist. The result was a swing toward protectionism. Nothing much has been done on this front yet, but both presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama have criticized China’s trade policies.

The tide is turningUnless the people rise up and demand change, I don’t believe the White House and Congress will do anything about our trade policies. Free trade and labor arbitrage have been very good for big business, pushing corporate profits
to record highs while average Americans struggle to fill their cars with gasoline.

Well-paid lobbyists will ensure that any anti-trade, anti-China legislation is dead on arrival to Congress. (Romney has promised to label China a currency manipulator, setting the stage for countervailing duties on Chinese goods. But legislation to do the same thing, which passed the Democratic-controlled Senate, has stalled in the Republican-controlled House.)

Fortunately, years of pain for American workers are bringing about a respite despite Washington’s recalcitrance.

The wage differentialConsider this: Back in 2000, in the twilight of the tech boom, factory wages in China averaged just 52 cents an hour — a mere 3% of what the average U.S. factory worker earned. In the years since, Chinese wages and benefits have jumped by double digits annually, with an average increase of 19% from 2005 to 2010.

With China’s workforce now peaking and labor shortages already developing in some of the coastal provinces, labor disputes and strikes — like the kind seen recently at factories supplying products as varied as flat-panel displays, auto parts and women’s lingerie — will surely become more common.

Beijing, mindful of the need to reorient China’s economy toward domestic consumption in the interests of sustainable growth, is becoming increasingly supportive of worker rights. Witness the recent regulatory spat over working conditions at Foxconn, the main supplier for Apple. Because of this, BCG anticipates further wage increases of 18% per year through 2015. By then, average pay in the Yangtze River Delta, the beating heart of China’s high-tech export machine, is expected to reach $6.31 per hour.

Here at home, fully loaded costs of U.S. production rose by less than 4% annually from 2005 to 2010 as labor unions became more flexible. Factoring in higher U.S. labor productivity, those Yangtze River Delta wages are likely to exceed 60% of U.S. manufacturing labor costs. After also factoring in favorable tax treatments for new factories, especially in Southern, nonunion U.S. states, the gap will be even smaller.

Plus, one must consider shipping expense, added wait times, and the plethora of hidden risks and costs of operating an extended global supply gain. China’s cost advantage won’t add up anymore.

Nor are other low-cost places like Vietnam and Indonesia suitable replacements, since they lack the infrastructure, talent, supply networks and productivity that have made China so attractive. For many, returning to the land of Stars and Stripes will be the best choice.

The impact on the economy will be “significant,” according to the BCG team. It identified seven industry groups — responsible for $200 billion in imports from China annually — for which rising costs in China will likely prompt the return of “Made in USA.” Examples include furniture, appliances, fabricated metals, machinery, transportation equipment, and plastics and rubber goods. Production of other items, such as apparel, textiles, footwear and computers, is expected to remain offshore.

What will this mean? Take a look at the chart below, showing an uptick in manufacturing jobs after a long decline.

Overall, relocation of manufacturing from China, combined with increased export competitiveness out of the United States to Europe and other developed markets, could create up to 3 million new jobs, cut the unemployment rate by 2% and lower the non-oil trade deficit by up to 35% over the next three years. Any reduction in the trade deficit is a direct addition to growth of gross domestic product.

Examples abound, though many of the companies are relatively small.

ET Water Systems, which had made irrigation controls in Dalian, China since 2002, has moved production and assembly to San Jose, Calif. High-end cookware maker All-Clad Metalcrafters is bringing lid production back to the U.S. from China. AmFor Electronics now enjoys lower delivery times and ease of design change after relocating wire-harness production from China and Mexico to Portland, Ore.

While we have a long road to travel to get back to where we were, at least we’re moving in the right direction. Things could be accelerated by focusing on America’s dilapidated infrastructure, encouraging domestic investment in new productive capital with permanent tax credits, reforming health care and education to increase productivity and lower benefit costs, and fingering China for what it is: a blatant mercantilist.

At the time of publication, Anthony Mirhaydari did not own or control shares of any company mentioned in this column in his personal portfolio.

The Promise of Today’s Factory Jobs

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Andy Manis/Bloomberg News: Maurcie Johnson, left, and Diandre Jackson stacked locks at the Master Lock plant in Milwaukee in January.
By EDUARDO PORTER of the New York Times on April 3, 2012
E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com Twitter: @portereduardo
To hear Mike Bink, one might believe American manufacturing is about to recapture its lost glory.Master Lock, which has made locks in Milwaukee since 1921, has brought 100 jobs back from China over the last year and a half. And Mr. Bink, who has worked at the plant for 33 years and heads the United Auto Workers local, is sure more will follow. “They are making a lot of capital investment; buying a lot of new equipment,” he said. “That will create more jobs.”Master Lock’s story dovetails nicely with the budding upturn in manufacturing employment, which has rekindled hope across a Rust Belt pummeled by 30 years of job loss. Nationwide, factories have added 400,000 jobs in the last two years, the first sustained bout of growth since the 1990s, replacing about a fifth of the positions lost during the recession. Other companies, from Otis to General Electric, are bringing home jobs once thought lost for good.

Mr. Bink’s enthusiasm has echoed from the factory floor all the way to Washington. During his State of the Union Message, President Obama wove Master Lock’s tale of repatriated jobs into a narrative of recovery that could serve him well in November. “We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back,” the president said. “But we have to seize it.”

To do so, his administration has proposed a piñata of tax breaks and incentives intended to transform the incipient movement into a new golden age for factory jobs.Things have not looked this promising for manufacturing jobs in a long while. Rising costs in China — where the government is letting the currency gain against the dollar and wages are rising at a double-digit pace — are making it more attractive for American companies to produce at home. Expensive oil adds to the cost by pushing up the price of freight.Yet a revolution in manufacturing employment seems far-fetched. Most of the factory jobs lost over the last three decades in this country are gone for good. In truth, they are not even very good jobs.

As much as the administration needs a jobs strategy, one narrowly focused on manufacturing is unlikely to deliver.

Much of the anxiety about factory jobs is based on the misconception that job losses have been due to a sclerotic manufacturing sector, unable to compete against cheap imports. Until the Great Recession clobbered the world economy, manufacturing production was actually holding its own. Real value added in manufacturing, the most precise measure of its contribution to the economy, has grown by more than two thirds since its heyday in 1979, when manufacturing employed almost 20 million Americans — eight million more than today.

American companies make a smaller share of the world’s stuff, of course. But what else could one expect? Thirty years ago China made very little of anything. Today its factory output is almost 20 percent of world production and about 15 percent of manufacturing value added.

What’s surprising is how little the United States lost in that time. American manufacturers contribute more than a fifth to global value added.

Manufacturers are shedding jobs around the industrial world. Germany lost more than a fifth of its factory jobs from 1991 to 2007, according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, about the same share as the United States. Japan — the manufacturing behemoth of the 1980s — lost a third.

This was partly because of China’s arrival on the world scene after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Since then, China has gained nearly 40 million factory jobs. But something else happened too: companies across the developed world invested in labor-saving technology.

Consider Master Lock. Its Milwaukee plant is operating at capacity for the first time in 15 years, before it started sending work overseas. It is producing much more stuff than it did back then. But it is doing so with 412 workers — about 750 fewer than it had 15 years ago.

“They used to throw bodies at something to get the job done,” said Ron McInroy, the U.A.W.’s head for the region encompassing Milwaukee. “Now they look at the best utilization of manpower and the best utilization of machines.”

So it is across the economy. In his forthcoming book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” the University of California, Berkeley, economist Enrico Moretti points out that the average American factory worker makes $180,000 worth of goods a year, more than three times what he produced in 1978, in today’s dollars.

It may not matter to factory workers who lost their jobs. Whether forced out because an employer moved production to China or because a fancy new machine makes it easier to compete against a rival in China, the job is gone.

Still, the distinction is important. Without an understanding of the forces at work, policy makers’ attempts to bolster manufacturing could backfire.

One thing is clear. Most of the jobs lost to China and other poor countries cannot “come back.” They don’t pay anywhere near enough. And they don’t exist here anymore anyway.

The factory jobs we really want will be fewer and will require more education. But they will pay more.

Remember agriculture? In the 1960s, plant scientists at the University of California, Davis, developed an oblong tomato that ripened uniformly, and its engineers developed a machine to harvest it with one pass through the fields. By the 1970s the number of workers hired for the tomato harvest in California had fallen by 90 percent.

In the book “Promise Unfulfilled,” Philip Martin, an economist at the university, says that in 1979 the worker advocacy group California Rural Legal Assistance sued the university for using public money on research that helped agribusiness at the expense of farm workers. And in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s agriculture secretary, Bob Bergland, declared that the government wouldn’t finance any more projects aimed at replacing “an adequate and willing work force with machines.”

It’s hard to say that workers won this battle, however. After Mr. Bergland pulled the plug, research on agricultural mechanization came to a near-halt. Yet farm work today remains probably the worst paid, most grueling job in the United States.

A tricky thing to understand is that most jobs in the United States are created in areas of the economy not exposed to global competition. They are nannies and doctors, lawyers and roofers. In a recent study, the Nobel laureate Mike Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo of New York University found that the part of the economy that does not have foreign competitors added 27.3 million jobs from 1990 to 2008. The sector that competes in global markets added virtually none.

This doesn’t mean the administration should ignore manufacturing. We need world-class, innovative industries that compete in global markets. They won’t add a ton of jobs precisely because they must stay lean to compete. But they will pay for those jobs.

The 33,000 Apple workers in Cupertino, Calif., sustain 171,000 additional jobs in the metropolitan area, Mr. Moretti estimates.

This pattern suggests, however, that a jobs strategy should take care not to blunt the edge of
our most competitive firms. If outsourcing sharpens their edge on world markets, punishing then for doing so could destroy American jobs.

More important, perhaps, manufacturing is not the nation’s only cutting-edge industry. Many of the most innovative firms are not manufacturers but service companies. Apple is very competitive. But so are the companies that design applications running on its iPhones and iPads. Hollywood studios and marketing companies are big exporters. These firms need highly trained workers and pay high wages.

Mr. Moretti says each job in an “innovation” industry, broadly understood, creates five other local jobs, about three times the number for an average job in manufacturing. Two of them are highly paid professional positions and three are low-paid jobs as waiters or clerks.

Innovation — not manufacturing —has always propelled this country’s progress. A strategy to reward manufacturers who increase their payroll in the United States may not be as effective as one to support the firms whose creations — whether physical stuff or immaterial services — can conquer world markets and pay for the jobs of the rest of us.

What are your thoughts on The Promise of Today’s Factory Jobs?