Manufacturing sector struggles to stay alive
Thursday, June 26, 2003 8:35 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleHere are some numbers that will ruin your day, especially if you work in manufacturing:
n 21,600 --- the number of manufacturing jobs lost in Washington from May 2002 to May 2003.
n 36,480 --- the number of people who had jobs in Cowlitz County in May 2002
n 35,630 --- the number of people who had jobs in Cowlitz County in May 2003
n 850 --- the number of jobs in Cowlitz County lost between May 2002 and May 2003.
The bad thing about these numbers is that they make things appear better than they are.
In Cowlitz County, for example, the loss of those 850 jobs is on top of the 925 Longview Aluminum jobs that were lost the year before. Ouch.
Across the state, the prospects of Boeing building its 7E7 Dreamliner here are unknown. At least 19 states are in the running to build the plane. If Boeing goes, a prospect that's more likely than not, the number of manufacturing jobs in the state will plummet. That will resonate in Cowlitz County because people out of work in the Puget Sound area won't be as likely to buy the lumber and packaging products that we produce, throwing us into even darker times.
Nationally, the picture is just as dismal. The Commerce Department reported yesterday that orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket items --- things like cars and appliances --- fell 0.3 percent last month, after falling 2.4 percent the month before.
As bad as all those numbers are, they're not what scares us the most. This scares us more: No one seems to be doing anything to address the systemic problems at the root of the decline in manufacturing jobs in our part of the country.
Yes, the Legislature and the governor have signed into law incentives to help Boeing stay here, but they don't address the fact that doing business in Washington is more expensive than it is in other parts of the country.
Southern states offer manufacturing companies big incentives to build there. We don't.
Smaller, rural states can offer lower overhead costs --- lower taxes and right-to-work rules that keep payroll costs lower --- than we do, making them more attractive to business people looking for places to locate their manufacturing plants.
Other states don't have anti-job creation laws, such as Washington's ergonomics laws, that put this state behind other states in being competitive for getting new manufacturing companies.
We want Boeing to build the 7E7 Dreamliner here, but we can see one bit of hope that could come out of this if Boeing builds that plane somewhere else: It would force people in this state to have a discussion about what changes we're willing to make to keep the jobs we have and create new ones.
Clearly, that discussion is not happening now. It needs to.
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