What Is Happening with Manufacturing in the Usa

What is Happening with Manufacturing in the USA

With the rapid industrialization China has gone through in the last decade, it’s no secret that many companies have moved offshore to outsource their product manufacturing due to cheap labor. However there is talk of a ‘renaissance’ in manufacturing beginning to occur in America. Some are skeptical about this idea but and it probably won’t become a main source of growth in America to pick up the economy, but the stats don’t lie. According to the commerce department, “manufacturing has rebounded from 11.9 percent of GDP in 2009 to 12.5 percent of GDP in 2012, Kurtleben, Daniel.” One significant problem is that this slight increase in manufacturing on American soil isn’t helping create more jobs, partly due to advances in production automation. It also isn’t adding to the GDP like it once was (this also can be seen on the graph in the lecture notes (Real Manufacturing Output and Employment).

So what are some other reasons big companies are starting to re-shore their productions? China is facing their own set of problems, they are losing their mega giant manufacturer image. They got too big too fast and now I believe that seducing American companies into outsourcing labor will be on the decline as we move forward into the future. The reasons for this is rapid advancement in manufacturing technology. Robots will be much cheaper to “pay” than human labor of any kind, not to mention more efficient. More and more manufacturing jobs will be automated. We see this in many large warehouses and vehicle assembly lines. As technology such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D printers, Robotic assembly lines improve, this will soon replace the need to pay humans for their labor which will ultimately bring more manufacturers back to America.