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New technologies have the potential to position U.S. manufacturing for a resurgence. This is great news for manufacturers, especially given current labor shortages. But could investments in technology and innovation also benefit frontline manufacturing workers? If so, how can institutional actors, including workforce development and business support programs, contribute to that outcome? This question is at the heart of a partnership between the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, the University of North Carolina, and Portland State University.
Here we present the results of this on-going collaboration: a series of case studies that explore how workforce intermediaries, education partners, business assistance programs, and community organizations pursue inclusion and innovation jointly through a mix of worker and firm-centered supports.
Communities experiencing the impacts of historic disinvestment, and especially those struggling because of the decline of traditional manufacturing, are often left out of employment structures that enable satisfying career pathways into the middle class. Despite unfilled openings currently, and predictions for a total of two million new jobs over the next decade, under-representation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian workers in senior manufacturing roles compounds racial wealth gaps. However, the right institutional interventions can break this exclusionary pattern, leading to fairer wages while forging career pathways that give workers of color the chance to meaningfully participate in a more innovative manufacturing future.
Now is the time to transition our manufacturing economies towards an inclusive innovation commitment by recognizing workforce development and technological innovation as two sides of the same coin. But as our own research shows, that alignment is not always guaranteed. It can be undermined when technologies improve firm productivity yet fail to improve the overall work experience, or worse still, threaten job security entirely. Standard “skills-gap” approaches to workforce development are complicit as well, often overemphasizing workforce preparation rather than considering complementary workplace improvements that align investments in training and technology over time.
In this series, we highlight a mix of strategies that overcome the broad, complex, and interrelated challenges facing the manufacturing industry. We look to several manufacturing communities that have maintained a strong tradition of making things, yet hold a concurrent desire to more equitably share the gains of that material creativity and productivity. The series begins with an extended case study of Buffalo, New York, showing how new institutional responses and alliances support frontline workers of color as the city’s manufacturing industry strives to adopt innovations and technological change. Together, these cases reveal lessons for how place-based institutions can come together to support reinforcing cycles of inclusive innovation through complementary investments in workplaces, the workforce, and technology.
This project is a partnership between researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Portland State University, and the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, with support from Siegel Family Endowment.
Sources:
-Andrew Stettner, Joel S. Yudken, and Michael McCormack, “Why Manufacturing Jobs Are Worth Saving,” Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative, The Century Foundation, 2017, https://tcf.org/content/report/manufacturing-jobs-worth-saving/.
-Nichola Lowe, “Putting Skill to Work: How to Create Good Jobs in Uncertain Times.” MIT Press 2021.