Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
National Council for Advanced Manufacturing
Washington, DC
June 9, 2005
Good morning and thank you all for inviting me to speak today. I am honored to be among an all-star line-up of manufacturing supporters including Congressmen Ehlers and Manzullo, Senator Kohl, and Secretary Gutierrez. We are all committed to maintaining a strong and vibrant manufacturing sector here in America.
American manufacturing finds itself in a very different world compared to 25 or even 5 years ago. We are now competing in a global economy where customers in the United States are connected in real-time to suppliers in South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The time from production to market has been cut from months to days and the cost of labor in some countries is pennies per unit.
American manufacturers must operate in this reality because there is no going back. The speed of communication, travel and trade and the interdependence of economies and institutions across international borders make protections and tariffs a false hope.
So to compete in this hyper-competitive global industry, American manufacturers had to do more than simply improve; they had to transform. Old-line, bulky manufacturers have gone lean or cellular, creating ultra-productive and efficient operations capable of crafting products of the finest quality just-in-time for market demand. It was a difficult and painful transition, but the future success of American manufacturing demanded it.
The hardest hit by this transformation was the manufacturing workforce. No longer were good hands and a strong back enough to be successful in manufacturing. Today workers need skills in math and engineering and computer programming while understanding supply-chain management and the integration of automated systems.
The transformation that American manufacturing experienced was not just from bulky to lean, but from traditional to advanced. Almost overnight, manufacturing went from a low-skill occupation to a high skill occupation.
So, the question we now face is how do we attract and prepare individuals for this new kind of manufacturing? About two years ago now, President Bush asked the Labor Department to engage the manufacturing industry under an effort called the High Growth Job Training Initiative to find answers to that challenge.
We began by meeting with executives from across the industry to understand the specific workforce challenges that they face. I recognize some in the room today as having attended a session hosted by NACFAM last spring. These sessions were valuable to us in defining the scope of the challenges and to begin thinking about potential solutions.
We then called together our education and training partners to meet with HR professionals from the industry and develop some specific solutions to the identified challenges.
This long process led us to last fall when Secretary Chao announced over $62 million in investments in the advanced manufacturing industry. These grants were designed to support partnerships between industry, education, and the public workforce system and model some of the solutions developed during the year.
The investments also included over $80 million in leveraged resources, bringing the total to nearly $150 million in projects to assist the manufacturing workforce. Descriptions of these projects can be found in the red folder you were each given.
These investments are only the first phase of our commitment to the manufacturing sector. We are currently in the first round of a grant competition under the President’s Community-Based Job Training Grants. This competition, better known as the Community College Initiative, is offering $125 million to community colleges, in partnership with employers and the workforce system, to improve the training opportunities in our community college system. The competition is open to all industries, but we are hoping to see some high quality proposals that focus on manufacturing.
Another opportunity on the horizon is a grant competition specifically focused on advanced manufacturing under the President’s High Growth Job Training Initiative. This opportunity will open later this summer and be available to workforce, education, and industry partners. Like the previous High Growth grants and the Community College Initiative, we expect to see proposals including all three of the major partners.
These grants are exciting opportunities to focus on the needs of specific industries, but they also serve a larger purpose; to demonstrate to the $15 billion workforce investment system how its normal course of business should be conducted.
Many of you have probably had limited interaction with the workforce system. I can’t say I blame you. The workforce system is a collection of 17 different programs delivered at the state and local levels through a nationwide network of 3,500 Career Centers. Each program has its own separate funding stream with different rules, reports, and regulations.
Like traditional manufacturing, the workforce system needs to undergo a dramatic transformation to be relevant to the global economy. That is why President Bush proposed a major Job Training Reform Proposal. This proposal combines many of those separate funding streams and allows Governors maximum flexibility to use the funds in ways that best serve individual state economies.
