"It costs a lot of money to do work in this country," Phyllis Eisen, vice president of the Manufacturing Institute of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), told the audience at the closing session of the IAMC Professional Forum on Amelia Island in early March. "Thirty-two percent more than our closest trading competitors, not including labor."

Phyllis Eisen

It does include energy, healthcare and infrastructure. That last item, along with the need for skilled labor, topped the agenda at NAM’s most recent board meeting, Eisen said. So is scraping away at a fundamentally un-level playing field, made so by a poor public image of the corporate world and a legacy image of manufacturing as a dirty business.

But manufacturing is "off the wall with productivity," she said, touting the fact that while agriculture exports $16 billion worth of goods a year, manufacturing exports that value in a month.

"Yes, a lot of jobs have gone overseas, and we’re now battling for the skilled labor," she said. "It is a race for talent. How many of you are retiring by 2015? How many by 2010? Next year is the beginning of the serious retirements of the baby boomers, our most skilled and most educated generation. It will ratchet up and ratchet up and in 20 years everyone will be gone. The hole they leave is stunning."

Think your children are going to fill the gap? Maybe, but it won’t be in a way we’d expect.

"Our children don’t want to work the way we do — we’ve done the research," said Eisen. "They don’t want to work as hard as you do. They want to spend more time with their families, fix the environment. They call themselves the perfect generation, high expectations for entitlement, and they don’t know what to do with their lives. We want to find them and put them into manufacturing."

A tall order, to be sure, and the first order of business is an image correction.

"We want them to be inventors and innovators. We need them to be our future thinkers, and they do not want to come," said Eisen. "They told us manufacturing was dark, dirty and in decline. They talked about the hairnets they’d have to wear, rote assembly line work. That of course is not what today’s manufacturing looks like. It’s working in teams, doing critical thinking. They don’t see it, their educators don’t see it and their parents don’t see it."

"We know cost is crushing us. The only thing that will save us in any of our industries is talent," Eisen continued. "It’s not about capital equipment anymore. It’s about people who make things in America. You might call it industrial distribution. Go up to the Hill and they just look at you blankly, which is why we get such stunning legislation out of Washington these days."

The first way to influence that talent is to educate it better, she says, noting that reform of public K-12 education is a "wheel that has not moved in this country for 30 years," despite high dropout rates and low percentages of four-year degrees. Another place to achieve some traction is community colleges, where Eisen noted that the average student age is 30. The reason to reform? The huge amount of money spent on remedial training, with 50 cents of every manufacturing training dollar going toward reading and writing skills.

Eisen said complaints about skilled worker, engineer and scientist shortages have now gone from whining in the 1990s to a shrill call.

"Pain gets attention," she said. "One third of these manufacturers we surveyed have good jobs, with average compensation of $66,000, but they cannot fill those jobs. We’re thinking it will be around 70 percent next year when we survey them again."

NAM’s answer is the "Dream It. Do It." campaign, created to literally market manufacturing to the people it so desperately needs. The program’s initial phase was launched in Kansas City, but its reach is broadening, sometimes in concert with the regions of the U.S. receiving Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) grants from the U.S. Dept. of Labor. In fact, as documented in Site Selection’s January 2007 issue, Eisen conferred directly with Cummins executives about this very issue as they chose to move forward with a major plant expansion in their hometown of Columbus, Ind.

"Bring economic developers, business, educators, civic leaders and politicians to the table, and create a provocative coalition that says ‘We are going to grow, and make manufacturing and its related services key to our economy, and we’re going to create the talent pool," said Eisen, who professed that even she was surprised by the positive results in Kansas City.

"There are 4,000 manufacturers in the Kansas City area, and 70 percent say they’re going to grow," she said. "When we put all that together, we matched educators with what businesses said they need, and they started to fill that skills gap. Things changed in less than a year. It was stunning. There was a 35-percent increase in enrollment at the business and technology college. People are hungry to be part of a team."

Communities are alive in northeast Ohio, Nebraska, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth and southwest Virginia, said Eisen, each with its unique stamp. "But we have to put together this collaborative, or we’re lost. The campaign is moving, but it’s not just about campaign, it’s about an attitude. Most of the things we do in this country are culturally driven. Every parent wants their kids to go to college. But that salary difference is starting to level off. Now there are certifications and two-year degrees. A CNC operator can make over $100,000, a laser welder can make $150,000 — it’s not welding the way we used to see welding. But who goes to factories anymore? Kids don’t. Parents don’t. So the old stereotypes linger. Make sure parents understand there are many pathways."

Sometimes those pathways involve new immigrants, she said, in response to question about H1B visas and the worrying trend of fewer foreign students in graduate schools.

"A strong immigrant community is a healthy community," she said in voicing NAM’s policy regarding foreign worker visas. "Diversity is our extraordinary gift. By 2015 the only growth in our work force will be in immigration. We’re bringing in 140,000 a year, in a work force of 165 million."

Asked how a community can join the "Dream It. Do It." campaign, Eisen said, "Call me. Our goal over the next few years is to get this in every community. We don’t touch your money. You pay us a small licensing fee, we give you a set of million-dollar ads, a survey, a skills gap analysis. We spotlight your community as a place that is growing. We don’t run it. You can’t run things from Washington, we know that."

Click on the image above to access Phyllis Eisen's Powerpoint presentation from Amelia Island.

Eisen admitted that in a free country, no organization or association can prevent a facility from moving out of town, but there is no limit to what that community can do to strengthen its attributes.

"We can make our own communities stronger so people don’t want to leave," she said. "We have to be collaborative." We also have to be flexible like never before, she said.

"I hear people say, ‘I want my kids to have stable job in a stable industry,’" she said, "and I say, ‘Well, where exactly would that be?’" I don’t feel despair, I feel hope. We think of things nobody else in the world thinks of. We’re so smart. Now we just have to be smarter."