Journey Home

Last Saturday began with a car trip through fog to visit Mother.

Rising from the Cedar River Valley at reduced speed, when I hit Walcott the sun came out.

It was clear this morning. Geese honked overhead, flying to open water where they landed.

The weather is warm and weird. It’s human nature to leverage what we have, so I’ll be working outside part of today and tomorrow.

A week into the new administration things are a bit foggy. Either 45 and his team don’t know what they are doing, or they are doing it so well no one can keep up with him. (It’s the former).

Good news is the sun will eventually burn off the clouds coming from Washington, D.C. enabling us to establish how we best mitigate the damage done by the billionaire in the White House and his associates.

45’s focus will be on jobs because that’s what got people to set aside what they abhorred and vote for him. Jobs was the main topic of his first weekly address.

On Friday the White House announced a manufacturing jobs initiative that includes many companies who took advantage of the Ronald Reagan years to restructure, reduce costs, and outsource jobs in a way that created what 45 described as “American carnage.” He feebly tried to pin the loss of manufacturing jobs on President Obama, whose financial recovery after the 2008 recession has been competent, but not stellar. For those of us who’ve worked for or with some of these companies, it’s a joke to think they have well-paying American jobs at heart when they are the co-creators of the decimation to which 45 referred.

The list includes U.S. Steel and Nucor Steel. The latter benefited from the high costs of the former and took market share with technology that replaced workers. I’ve been to the former U.S. Steel Works in Fairless Hills, Penn., Cleveland, Ohio, and Chicago, Ill. I’ve also been to Nucor plants in Tennessee. It is as if these two companies were predators whose sole purpose was to wreak havoc on union steel jobs. Notably missing from the list are the international steel companies ArcelorMittal, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation, Hebei Iron and Steel Group, and others that each in its own way contributed to the downfall of U.S. steel companies. ArcelorMittal is the poster child for globalization and its impact on workers. In terms of the initiative’s potential effectiveness, it’s notable that Lakshmi Mittal is absent from the list.

General Electric, Whirlpool and others were participants in the great post-Reagan restructuring of the American workforce. All of the companies on the list, with the exception of two token AFL-CIO representatives, are very large companies. What I expect is corporate leaders will reach consensus about what they need, present it to 45, who will work with the Congress to improve the environment for manufacturing within our borders. Ideas related to reducing environmental regulations, the government picking up cleanup costs, tort reform and removing what little power remains in the private sector unions will be de rigueur.

Job creation is the Achilles heel for 45 because so much of his victory was based on the promise of increased American jobs — manufacturing jobs particularly. It seems doubtful he can pull it off in a sustainable way.

This is one area of the new administration we should follow closely.

Since the general election I’ve been laying low, listening to people talk about the new administration and what President Donald J. Trump means to them.

Most supporters found a lot of what the president said and stands for to be objectionable, but voted for him because of the hope for jobs — a central campaign theme. Manufacturing jobs specifically. The kind with which I am very familiar.

On an issue page of the White House web page the administration laid it out:

Since the recession of 2008, American workers and businesses have suffered through the slowest economic recovery since World War II. The U.S. lost nearly 300,000 manufacturing jobs during this period, while the share of Americans in the work force plummeted to lows not seen since the 1970s, the national debt doubled, and middle class got smaller. To get the economy back on track, President Trump has outlined a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth.

As a deal-maker, 45 asserts he knows how to do it. His plan is not public so it’s impossible to evaluate it.

The metrics to evaluate 45’s proposal against what happens already exist in the Labor Department jobs report which shows the millions of jobs created during the Obama administration. Fill out the chart as time passes and new results are in, and there is an objective basis on which to evaluate performance. That is, assuming the methods of calculating jobs growth remain constant. A similar metric holds true for measuring economic growth. We should have a solid couple years in before the 2020 campaign begins. Thumbs up or thumbs down. It should be that simple.

I’ve worked several manufacturing jobs during my life and as a director of a logistics company that evaluated countless others. While living in Indiana I interviewed more than 10,000 people impacted by the exodus of jobs in the rust belt which produced what 45 described as the “American carnage” in his inaugural address. This is my turf, although it was during the Reagan administration, not the Obama administration the web site references.

45’s discussion of bringing manufacturing jobs “back” is a bait and switch. Globalization of the manufacturing process and automation that includes robots doing repetitive tasks has eliminated many manufacturing jobs permanently. It will eliminate more.

Yes some went to Mexico. When Mexico got too expensive they went to China and other parts of Asia. Those jobs are gone and we can’t and don’t want to go back to manufacturing as it was.

Like it or not, with Wall Street occupying four key positions in the administration whatever jobs are created are likely to be similar to those under Obama.

Coal mining runs through my family tree.

It was unskilled labor required of the Industrial Revolution and whether my forbears had been in the United States a century before the American Revolution or had just arrived in the late 19th Century, cheap unskilled labor was needed to mine coal and men in our family did it.

Automation and changing methods of strip mining significantly reduced the number of workers required. Those jobs aren’t coming back either, especially as the cost of renewable energy continues to reach grid parity with coal, and countries like China realize the growth of coal powered electricity generation is making its people sick and look to other electricity generation means. Demand for coal is expected to wane.

I am not hopeful for resurgence in manufacturing jobs, nor was this my issue. However, 45’s posture on jobs came from the lips of every Trump voter with whom I spoke, no exceptions.

If Democrats hope to win the next presidential election we need to understand why friends, neighbors and work colleagues voted for 45. In part, it was about jobs I don’t believe will be back the way we knew them.