Reinvigorate the American Dream through Manufacturing

 

“By almost any measure, the American Dream is in peril. The  robust middle class growth of the 1950s and 1960′s began to fade in the 1970s and the core elements of the American Dream—homeownership, (job security*), secure retirement and building a better life for your children—steadily eroded in the decades that followed.” -Milstein Symposium Report, Building a Nation of Makers, June 13.

The report indicates that manufacturing remains a vital pathway to middle class and achieving the American Dream.

Here are the six fresh, actionable ideas to expand the opportunities for middle class manufacturing jobs, restoring the American Dream developed by the Millstein Commission:

• Talent Investment loans to expand human capital
• Upside-down degrees to connect classroom learning with on-the-job learning
• A skills census to build a more efficient skilled labor force
• A national supply chain initiative
• Fully map America’s manufacturing
• Up-skilling high school students with expanded technology and engineering certification programs
• A “big trends—small firms” initiative to diffuse the latest technologies to manufacturing SMEs

Together, these recommendations wield tremendous transformative potential.

These ideas are actually able to be done. They address remediable issues in the manufacturing ecosystem, outside of politics, which appear to be in perpetual gridlock.

These ideas are implementable. In future posts, I hope to show how in fact these are actually part of the existing work product of PMPA, and how the identification of these by the commission validates our work and strategic plan.

These ideas add value. PMPA has been involved in skilled workforce in manufacturing actively since the president first convened the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (PCJC),  and ongoing through our work with other organizations, including MFG Day and Business Leaders United, various community colleges and others. Yet, there are ideas in the symposium’s report that are new and worth trying.

*Added by Miles Free.

Originally posted at PMPAspeakingofprecision.com blog.