[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 162 (Thursday, November 14, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8052-S8053]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. KIRK (for himself, Mr. Coons, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Blunt):
  S. 1709. A bill to require the Committee on Technology of the 
National Science and Technology Council to develop and update a 
national manufacturing competitiveness strategic plan, and for other 
purposes; to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I come to the floor again today to talk 
about jobs, about manufacturing jobs, about the high-quality, high-
skill wage jobs America needs for today and for the future.
  Today I have introduced a bill which shows that dealing with our 
ongoing challenges of supporting our manufacturing sector and growing 
jobs in our manufacturing sector can have bipartisan solutions. Senator 
Mark Kirk of Illinois joined me in introducing the American 
Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, which has a simple but important 
objective: to require the creation of a national manufacturing 
strategy.
  Today more than 12 million Americans are directly employed in 
manufacturing. As I have said on the floor before as part of our 
Manufacturing Jobs for America Initiative, manufacturing jobs are good 
jobs. They are high-skilled jobs, they are high-wage jobs, they are 
high-benefit jobs, and they have a terrific secondary benefit in terms 
of the other support and service sector jobs that come along with 
manufacturing jobs in a community.
  We need to know the direction we are heading as a country as we try 
to support the growth of manufacturing. We have grown more than half a 
million manufacturing jobs in the last 3 years. That is an encouraging 
sign. We are one of the most productive in the output of our 
manufacturing sector of all the countries in the world.
  What we have lacked is a very coordinated strategy between the 
Federal Government, State governments, and the private sector to align 
all of our investments--our investments in research and development, 
our investments in new skills, our investments in infrastructure--to 
make sure they are all heading in the right direction.
  Do our competitors have national manufacturing strategies? 
Absolutely. Germany, China, India, South Africa,

[[Page S8053]]

and Russia all have thoroughly developed, deeply researched, and 
prominently successful strategies for how to accelerate and sustain 
manufacturing as a key part of their economies.
  This bill would amend the America COMPETES Act. It would require 
every 4 years that the Secretary of Commerce, advised by a board of 15 
different folks, pull together and think through, research, and then 
deliver a national manufacturing strategy. This doesn't require new 
programs. It doesn't even necessarily require new funding or new 
Federal expenditures. It only requires that we coordinate all the 
different areas where the Federal Government is investing in supporting 
manufacturing and where State and local governments are working in 
partnership with the private sector. This may be a small but vital step 
toward giving the lift we need for our manufacturing sector to continue 
its sustained growth of the last few years.
  Why is a manufacturing strategy essential? Because we have a couple 
of areas where, frankly, we are falling short--in infrastructure, in 
access to capital, and in skills. Having a highly skilled manufacturing 
workforce is one of the things we need to do if we are going to win the 
fight to regain our international prominence as the leading global 
manufacturing country.
  The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, a global consulting firm, 
have both independently concluded that there are as many as 600,000 
manufacturing jobs in America today that are unfilled because of a lack 
of a workforce with the relevant skills. The Society of Manufacturing 
Engineers estimates that number could increased to 3 million by 2015.
  So a focus through a national strategy and through some facilitating 
investments and legislation by this body and the House and by enactment 
by the President and investments across-the-board could deal with these 
important skill gaps.
  Why are there skill gaps in manufacturing? Many Americans have a 
misconception about what manufacturing is like today. They have a 
picture in their heads of manufacturing from 10, 20, or 30 years ago 
when it required simple labor, when it required repeated routine tasks 
such as simply putting on a bolt or affixing a particular piece onto a 
vehicle, where there wasn't any teamwork, there wasn't any continuous 
improvement required, and there weren't analytical skills required. 
That was the manufacturing line of the past, not of today and certainly 
not of the future. In fact, the skills required to be successful in 
modern advanced manufacturing are quite different from what they were 
10, 20, or 30 years ago. Today one has to work as part of a team and be 
able to troubleshoot and problem-solve.
  There are fewer people working on manufacturing lines, but they are 
higher in productivity because the analytical skills they are bringing 
to the job are greater than they have ever been before. That is also 
why manufacturing can be a more satisfying career, a more rewarding 
place to work than it was in the past, because it engages the whole 
human being. It engages the whole worker. It allows them to have 
ownership of the quality of the finished product.
  One of the lessons American automobile manufacturing learned in the 
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s as it faced the threat of higher quality auto 
manufacturing elsewhere in the world was to not only retool the 
manufacturing line but to empower the individual worker to be engaged 
in quality control.
  Those of us here in the Senate who worked in the manufacturing 
industry know what it meant to have gone through a process where we had 
to certify. You had to go through a searching auditing process to be 
able to demonstrate, if you were a component supplier or if you were 
part of a supply chain, that you were meeting world-class standards. In 
fact, the ISO 9000 system--the International Organization for 
Standardization--and its 9000 series audits that swept through the 
country over 20 years and ended up resulting in a higher quality of 
manufacturing was just the first of a number of steps toward requiring 
those who were working in manufacturing facilities to have a higher 
level of skills.
  One of the ways in which we have an ongoing challenge is that 
manufacturers--medium and small manufacturers with whom I visited up 
and down the State of Delaware--don't know the level of skills and the 
quality of skills of young people they wish to hire who may have just 
finished high school or might have taken a certificate course with a 
community college. We don't have a transportable, translatable 
certificate for basic manufacturing skills.
  One of the innovations of the IT industry was a whole series of 
skills certifications that allow someone to know, when they are hiring 
a young person to do office support for IT or when they are hiring 
someone to be a network administrator, whether they have the practical 
skills they need to do that job and do it well. They can't guess that 
by where they went to high school or what courses they took at a 
college. We don't have a similar sort of reliable, transportable, 
translatable, manufacturing skill certification process. That may be a 
part of this national manufacturing strategy.
  We certainly have heard from manufacturers large and small--not only 
in Delaware but around the country--about what they need, what would 
put a floor beneath their growth and would allow them to be globally 
competitive. No. 1 would be a stronger, skilled workforce; No. 2 would 
be more access to capital; and No. 3 would be more and better access on 
a fair basis to a global market and a global economy.
  We have had a great first couple of weeks with the Manufacturing Jobs 
for America Initiative. More than 25 Senators have contributed more 
than 40 bills. Many of these are broad or bold or bipartisan bills that 
contain the ideas that I think can sustain and grow manufacturing in 
the United States going forward. It is a growing menu of bills--bills 
that are bipartisan and that I believe not only need but deserve a vote 
on the floor later in this Congress.
  I am grateful to Senator Kirk for partnering with me in introducing 
this bill today, the American Manufacturing Competitiveness Act, and I 
am hopeful it will pick up more bipartisan sponsors in the days and 
weeks ahead. I also hope, working in partnership with the Manufacturing 
Caucus, ably led by Senator Stabenow and Senator Graham, we will begin 
to hammer out the bipartisan bills that will deserve a vote on this 
floor and that will ultimately reach enactment through the Congress and 
by signature of our President. With that, we might well be able to 
deliver on what we hear most often from our constituents: Help us grow 
high-quality jobs in this country.
                                 ______