A return to ‘Made in America’: Why manufacturing is making a comeback – Washington Post

The rationale? The company is expanding into the U.S. market and needs the flexibility to assemble units for speedy delivery across the country, says Jay Parker, Lenovo’s president for North America.

But also — and this was crucial — the math added up. While it’s still cheaper to build things in China, those famously low Chinese wages have risen in recent years. “We reached the point where we could offset a portion of those labor costs by saving on logistics,” Parker says.

U.S. firms that have long operated abroad are making similar moves: Caterpillar, GE and Ford are among those that have announced that they’re shifting some manufacturing operations back to the United States. And economists are debating whether these stories are a blip — or whether they signal the beginning of a major renaissances for American manufacturing.

It’s easy to be skeptical. So far, the effect on jobs has been modest. Since January 2010, the United States has added 520,000 manufacturing jobs — and of those, 50,000 have come from overseas firms moving here, according to the Reshoring Initiative, an industry-led group. (That includes 115 in the new Lenovo plant.) That’s a decent number, but it pales beside the 6 million factory jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says vanished between 2000 and 2009.

Yet the optimists counter that the logic of a coming renaissance is impeccable. Besides the shrinking wage gap between China and the United States, the productivity of the American worker keeps rising. And the surge in
shale gas drilling
gives the United States a wealth of cheap domestic energy to bolster industries such as petrochemicals.

All that could combine to make U.S. factories more competitive in the years ahead, not just with Europe and Japan, but with the manufacturing behemoth inChina. This shift likely won’t mean the United States will have 19 million manufacturing workers again, the way it did in the 1980s. For one thing, automation is still a powerful force. And the types of jobs that come back will be different from the ones that vanished. Still, any significant uptick in domestic manufacturing after a decades-long decline could bolster the economy and spur innovation.

“I think it’s fair to say this hasn’t all registered in the data just yet,” says Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “But we’re starting to lay the groundwork where we’ll start to see a real effect three to 10 years from now.”

Laying the groundwork

So what does that groundwork look like? For many analysts, the narrowing of the wage gap between China and the United States is the most significant factor.China has been getting wealthier, and its factory workers are demanding ever-higher wages. Whereas the gap in labor costs between the two countries was about $17 per hour in 2006, that could shrink to as little as $7 per hour by 2015, says Dan North, an economist with Euler Hermes, a credit insurer that works with manufacturers.