GrowJobsCT

US auto makers are in deep financial trouble.  It’s no surprise that an industry that relies on confident consumers and an array of financing options would feel the effects of a near-collapse of credit, and looming predictions about hard times ahead.

These companies are certainly as important as many of the financial sector businesses now on taxpayer-funded life support.  Between them, GM, Chrysler and Ford employ 240,000 workers directly.  Up to 5 million US workers, employed everywhere from parts suppliers to auto dealships, depend on the US auto industry for their livelihoods.

The automakers are now asking for a bailout.  There’s a sharp debate brewing in Washington, on Wall St. and down at the local diner where you find the folks who eventually will pay for all this, about whether to assist with government funds.

Whether these enterprises are saved through private means or the public coffers, they are in need of a drastic overhaul.  For years, we have happily motored along in monstrosities — vehicles that use too much fuel, create too much pollution and are loaded with toxins.  US cars are too big, too dirty and too inefficient for our own good, or for global sales.

Earlier this year, I visited the Ford truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan.  They touted a grass-covered roof, skylights to save electricty, rain basins and other ecologically-friendly measures, all in service to a factory producing trucks that get 12 - 14 miles to the gallon.  I asked then if the facility could be retooled for smaller vehicles.  The Ford Escape, an SUV, is the smallest car that can be made there.

The workers in that plant earn their money.  The tasks they perform are complicated, repetitious and exacting.  But by virtue of the high profit margin associated with trucks and SUV’s in general, the Dearborn Ford workers are wedded to a product whose time has passed.

It cannot be expected that the automakers will, on their own, raise emission and mileage standards, or shift to alternative sources of energy.  They have had a long, successful history of bending the market to their products through skillful and non-stop advertising.  Now, for a variety of reasons, we are at the end of that ride too.

Regardless of what Congress does in the form of a bailout, there should be an insistence on steering vehicles into the 21st century.  That means less harmful exhaust, much greater fuel efficiency, and alternative energy sources.  It also means “greening” the vehicles so that more of the product can be recycled at the end of its use.

Especially if we’re all chipping in, we ought to have a say on where we’re going.  And we can’t get to the future if the automakers remain stuck in reverse.

Barack Obama won chiefly due to people’s deep anxiety about the US economy.  The financial crisis crystalized what many people have felt for years — that despite the accumulation of great wealth for some in recent times, the US economy seems riddled with spring-loaded traps and hidden sinkholes.  One day you have a job, or your business is running great; the next day you’re out, done, finished, and nothing or nobody can undo the damage.

Whether you 55 and hoping to make it to retirement, or 25 and looking for a sustainable career path to raise a family and enjoy a decent life, the mercurial and often cruel quality of worklife in the USA is stressful, and unduly so.  In a market economy, no one can predict the sustainability of any particular venture.  But for awhile now, the game board has been profoundly off-kilter, leaving all of us worried on a daily basis about what tomorrow might bring.  When the best efforts of an employee, or an enterprise, can be discarded without warning or regret at a moment’s notice, for the sake of a few more pennies on mountainous money piles, nobody can or will feel safe.

So Obama’s campaign promise to reward businesses that create jobs here in the US, and at a minimum, eliminate incentives for those who export US jobs, is a commitment that must be kept.  Companies have no choice but to use every competitive tool at their disposal — if they do not, their rival certainly will.  That means the rules of the road must reflect our values and our collective self-interest, and provide the appropriate restraints business cannot self-impose.  If we want to grow the US economy, it’s past time to stop encouraging outsourcing and offshoring, and high time we invested in employment here.

Obama has also rightly identified renewable, alternative energy production as a major source of new US jobs.  George Soros, international financier, recently told Bill Moyers that the past engine of global economic growth — the US consumer — is incapable of continuing to fill that role.  Soros went on to say that “green energy” is ready to take over the role as the prime engine of the global economy.  That sounds right.

In Obama’s election night speech in Chicago, he summed up the extreme challenges we face at this moment in simple but stark terms as: “two ongoing wars, a planet in peril, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”  What is equally striking is how remarkably a national effort for green energy would help address that entire retinue of daunting problems Obama identified.

Beyond green energy, there’s a shamefully-neglected infrastructure about to collapse around our ears.  And despite rumors of its demise, manufacturing is still open for business in the USA, but needing the kind of encouragement that competing countries long ago understood as worth the investment.

One shortage we’re unlikely to face is suggestions, recommendations, demands and imperatives to the new President from every sector of our society.  There’s lots to do, and a huge sense of pent-up demand after eight years of an administration with a relatively narrow agenda.

Obama will be hearing from everyone, needing everything. But if he and his staff can cut through the din as well as they did during months of campaign cacaphony, they will identify the major chord underlying all the wailing — it’s the need for jobs, jobs, jobs.

Last week NASA announced they would do a full re-bid of the next generation of spacesuits.

That’s not the final prize, but it’s still a victory for Hamilton Sundstrand, hourly and management, to be in the running in what looks like a fair competition for the contract.

Earlier this year, HSD was shut out by a NASA decision to give the contract to a Houston-based company.  That contract was rescined due to “irregularities” in the evaluation procedure.  To their credit, HSD decided to challenge NASA’s decision — a bold move considering that HSD’s “Space, Land and Seas” division essentially has one customer — NASA.

Without breaking our arm to pat ourselves on the back, part of this story is also about GrowJobsCT.  We encouraged IAM Local 743 to pursue the issue, and then got the staff of the CT Congressional delegation together to discuss the issue and how to encourage NASA to re-examine their decision.

US Senator Dodd immediately grabbed the ball and ran with it — writing to NASA, speaking with their Director, asking colleagues to communicate, and even coming to the Windsor Locks facility to confer with company and union officials and speak with employees and the press.

The rest of the Congressional delegation did their part as well, without exception.  All five US Representatives and both Senators wrote to NASA expressing their concern about keeping the work in Connecticut, and the remarkable record the HSD spacesuit has achieved — 40 years of flawless performance.

Nothing is final yet — all of this just gives HSD the ability to compete fairly for the contract.  But that’s all that should be expected.  With a fair competition, the “Experienced Spacesuit Team” at HSD is ready, willing and able to continue making spacesuits that perform flawlessly.

Welcome to the new and improved GrowJobsCT web site!  We hope you will check here often to get the latest news, analysis and opinions about jobs, manufacturing, economic development and how best to keep Connecticut a great place to work, live and raise a family.
One new feature of the web site is this blog.  Join me on a regular basis to find out what we’re working on, what’s working out and what didn’t work at all.  Stay in touch — bookmark our new site and let us know what you think.  Thanks.