According to Scott Paul (pictured), president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), US president Barack Obama has failed to fulfil a pledge made in his 2012 State of the Union address to revive the country’s manufacturing sector.
Later that year, when Mr Obama was campaigning to be re-elected to the White House, he promised to create a million new manufacturing jobs by the end of his second term. Mr Paul said that, although the president will have “many defining legacies, reviving American manufacturing will not be among them.”
He said that Mr Obama could take “some credit” for the renewed success of the US automotive sector through the rescue package that he secured, although the increase in sales was also “driven by low fuel costs, low interest rates and pent-up demand”.
He also said that Mr Obama can be praised for helping to set up a network of public-private innovation institutes that are beginning to start up across the USA. “These new partnerships will be quite valuable for developing cutting-edge products, processes and training programmes for the next generation of industry.”
However, Mr Paul said that Mr Obama had failed to understand that “you can’t get manufacturing right unless you get trade and exchange-rate policy right. How short is President Obama of his promise to create a million new manufacturing jobs? So far, his progress stands at just 370,000, according to Labor Department statistics — that is a big miss.
“If the blame could simply be chalked up to a new recession, increased automation or market forces beyond anyone’s control, then I wouldn’t have much of a gripe about this shortfall in factory jobs.
However, much of the fault lies in the fact that the president hasn’t defended these jobs forcefully enough or fought to get back the ones we lost. The recently announced new commercial and trade ‘commitments’ made with China are the very definition of ‘small ball’. Meanwhile, economic estimates predict that the proposed new Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will make our manufacturing trade deficit even larger.
“This isn’t just hurt feelings over a broken campaign promise, which happens all the time. There is a strong case that many of the remaining questions about the health of the economic recovery — including wage stagnation, rising inequality and a shrinking middle class — have their roots in the struggling manufacturing sector.
“We are going to see more of the same until we get serious about addressing this persistent blemish on our economic record. We need a legitimate trade enforcement that keeps the competition from using the US market as a dumping ground for subsidised goods, an acknowledgement of a goods trade deficit that breaks records every year and a plan to do something about it.”