Dayton should see ‘lost’ aerospace, automotive and manufacturing jobs returning – Dayton Daily News

By Steve Bennish,



Staff Writer






















Updated 1:57 PM Saturday, February 18, 2012

DAYTON — Many of those so-called jobs that “would never come back” are on their way back to the United States, in the view of corporate leaders, economists and a study by a global consulting group.

Game-changing factors include rising fuel and wage costs abroad and supply-chain concerns following natural disasters like the tsunami that hit Japan. Desire for quicker delivery times and quality control is a large motive, too. Dayton, located on Interstate 75, should see new aerospace, automotive, and advanced manufacturing, said Kristi Tanner, CEO of the new JobsOhio economic development agency.

“Ohio can be the reshoring capital of the Midwest,” Tanner said.

President Obama appeared Wednesday at Master Lock, the Milwaukee padlock company that has reshored 100 jobs to the U.S. from China.

There he advocated for tax changes to reward domestic manufacturers while imposing minimum taxes on multinationals so they can’t tax dodge by shipping jobs and profits overseas.

The Boston Consulting Group, in a report last year, said offshored jobs are headed home as the wage gap with China shrinks and certain U.S. states become “some of the cheapest locations for manufacturing in the developed world.”

All in all, said Eric Burkland, president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association, “there is a total rethinking going on. That will be an opportunity. We can’t blow this. We have been through a period of complete and total pain and trauma in American manufacturing because of global conditions. That is changing.”

The Clean Ohio fund has disbursed $22.9 million for Montgomery County in the past eight years to clean up old industrial sites for reuse, mostly in Dayton, according to the Ohio Department of Development.

Shelley Dickstein, Dayton’s assistant city manager, mentions as reuse candidates cleaned-up brownfields like the former Howard Paper industrial site on Edwin C. Moses.

Two sites with active rail service include the former McCalls/NIBCO industrial tract off Germantown Street and the city’s greenfield Northwest Industrial Park.

“We have the supply and a great work force,” Dickstein said. “I can’t imagine why we can’t be competitive as we look at the reshore intiatives.”

Challenges are great. The state has posted epic job losses in recent years. Total nonagriculture employment in December was 5.1 million, down from 5.6 million in January 2000, state figures show. State manufacturing was gutted from the closure of 3,500 factories that also drained industry skilled-labor pools. There are ongoing trade disputes with nations like China that harm Ohio’s heavy industry, political gridlock in Washington, D.C., that hinders progress on budget, energy policy and taxation issues, and an international trade deficit that shot up to $558 billion in 2011, the largest since 2008.

The trade deficit is the difference between what is made here with American labor and sold abroad and what we import from other nations. .

But the Boston group’s study said China’s wages are rising at about 17 percent per year and the value of the yuan, China’s currency, is also appreciating. Optimists say labor costs for manufacturing in China and the U.S. will converge by around 2015.

As a result, more products will be made here in the next five years, said lead author Harold L. Sirkin. The study predicted less labor-intensive products made in modest volumes are most likely to return, including vehicles, auto parts, electrical equipment, appliances, plastics and rubber products, machinery, fabricated metal products, and computers/electronics.

That could create two to three million new manufacturing jobs and add $100 billion to the U.S. economy. It could also lower the U.S. non-oil trade deficit by 20 to 35 percent. Sirkin cited Caterpillar Inc.’s expansion of a new hydraulic excavator manufacturing facility in Texas and NCR Corp.’s bringing back production of ATMs to Georgia.

Perhaps a foreshadow can be seen at the Dayton Campus for Advanced Material Technologies on McCall Street, a refurbished Delphi facility. It now houses five small young companies that employ about 30, including a manufacturer of composite utility poles and composite vehicle springs, said Timothy Downs, the city’s deputy director of economic development.

There’s ample room to expand, he added, as production ramps up.

General Electric Corp., which has been criticized for offshoring U.S. jobs in recent years, last week hosted a four-day conference in Washington, D.C. on manufacturing, innovation, jobs and trade.

Jim McNerney, chief executive of Boeing, attended, as did Andrew Liveris, president, chairman & CEO, The Dow Chemical Co.

McNerney said that chasing the cheapest workers across extended supply chains came at the cost of quality and customer service. In an interview with Reuters, he even compared corporate offshoring to lemmings famous for mass herding and running off cliffs. GE said it is investing $580 million in the expansion of its aviation manufacturing and research & development in the U.S. to “support growing production rates and expanded product offerings.”

GE said it plans investment in the U.S. that includes the construction or rebuilding of 16 plants and more than 12,000 new jobs.

The company added that GE Aviation will add more than 400 new manufacturing jobs and in 2013 will open the three new sites that are under construction in Ellisville, Miss., Auburn, Ala., and here.

Locally, GE will have operations at the Electrical Power Integrated Systems Research and Development Center on the University of Dayton campus that’s projected to add between 100 and 200 workers over the next several years.

Hope is that products developed here will be made here, said Steve Budd of CityWide Development.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.