[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 147 (Thursday, December 4, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6321-S6323]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MANUFACTURING SKILLS ACT
Mr. COONS. Madam President, I come to the floor this morning with my
colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Kelly Ayotte, to talk about what
we can do together to invest in America's 21st-century manufacturing
workforce. As the Presiding Officer well knows, manufacturing is one of
the great areas of opportunity for meaningful bipartisan cooperation
that will move our country, our economy, and our working families
forward.
Although so many issues here these days seem to fall on partisan
lines, Senator Ayotte and I are here today because we have come
together on a bipartisan bill called the Manufacturing Skills Act. The
bill has one simple goal, which we share: to spur reforms in
manufacturing skills training across our country. That is it. Our bill
would create a competitive grant program to help local and State
governments design and implement manufacturing job-training reforms
that fit their own unique local economic needs. Once proposals come in,
a Federal interagency partnership would award the five strongest State
proposals and the five strongest local government proposals with
funding for 3 years to implement their targeted reforms to improve
their manufacturing skills training. The funding doesn't all come from
the Federal Government, either. Something Senator Ayotte and I share
enthusiasm for is getting leverage for Federal investment. The local
and State government must match Federal support one-to-one.
We are focusing on manufacturing specifically because it plays such a
vital role in building communities and strengthening our middle class.
Last year, in fact, manufacturing contributed more than $2 trillion to
our Nation's economy. In many ways manufacturing has long been the
foundation of our economy. As we know, manufacturing jobs are high-
quality jobs. They pay more in wages and benefits. Manufacturing is
highly innovative. It is the area that invests the most in R&D of any
private sector component. Over the last 3 years manufacturing has
started coming back steadily and rapidly, with more than 700,000 new
manufacturing jobs created in our country.
This is all good news, and I am convinced the United States is poised
to really compete in the manufacturing economy of this century. But we
still face key challenges in the job market for manufacturing. There
are manufacturers whom I have visited with up and down my State and
whom we have
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heard from across the country who are ready to hire but cannot fill
open positions. The problem is only expected to get worse. By 2020, by
some estimates, there may be more than 875,000 unfilled manufacturing
jobs. Yet there remains no focused, targeted Federal workforce
development program specifically designed to strengthen manufacturing
skills. I think part of the reason is we often have an outdated view of
manufacturing. It conjures up outdated images of dirty factories and
unsafe working conditions and lower skilled labor. That is not the
manufacturing workplace of today at all.
I would be curious to hear the thoughts of my colleague from New
Hampshire on how manufacturing has changed and how we can work together
to strengthen the skills of manufacturing workers in Delaware, New
Hampshire, and across our country.
Ms. AYOTTE. I thank my colleague from Delaware. It has really been an
honor to work with him on the Manufacturing Skills Act, and we share
the goal to ensure that manufacturing remains vibrant and a vibrant
source of jobs in our economy.
Training our workforce to have the right skills to address today's
21st-century manufacturing is quite different from yesteryear. Today as
we look at manufacturing, we see the skills our workers need: critical
thinking and problem-solving abilities, math and writing skills and the
ability to communicate, an understanding of the manufacturing process,
and an ability to engage workers in improving that process. This wasn't
necessarily the case 20 or 30 years ago, but the United States is
poised and has an opportunity to be the leader in advanced
manufacturing.
We have a talented workforce, but our workers need the type of
training that is going to address this new type of manufacturing that
is focused on having the right skills and technology, use of technology
and problem-solving skills that we know workers in New Hampshire and
Delaware are quite capable of if we give them the tools they need.
A reality of today's world is that although our economy is bigger, we
are more interconnected than ever before. Job training needs to be
customized to the particular business area--the city, the State, the
local economy. There is no ``one size fits all'' model. This is
especially true in manufacturing--and I visited many manufacturers in
our State--where different companies and places need workers with
varying skills.
That is one of the reasons I am so enthusiastic about the
Manufacturing Skills Act that Senator Coons and I have introduced
together. Rather than prescribe job-training standards or dictate
reforms from Washington, our bill allows local officials, business
leaders, and workers to come together in local communities to build
training plans that fit their needs and help grow jobs in the community
because Wilmington and Newark, DE, have very different workforce
challenges, perhaps, than some areas of New Hampshire, whether it is
Nashua or Concord or Berlin. We need to ensure that local officials,
local employers, and the people of our States are using the grants we
are able to provide under this legislation to design new training
programs for those localities to really allow those workers to be
trained for 21st-century manufacturing skills.
By both targeting manufacturing and giving localities the discretion
to design the reforms that fit their needs, we have come together on a
bill that could help our country meet some of its most critical
economic challenges and opportunities.
I know Senator Coons has a strong background in manufacturing and has
worked very closely with employers and workers in Delaware to hear from
them about what job-training needs they have to ensure Delaware can
have that 21st-century workforce. I would love to hear more about some
of the challenges he has heard about from employers and workers in
Delaware.
Mr. COONS. Madam President, I would like to thank my colleague from
New Hampshire. We are both from small States that are not nationally
thought of as being leaders in manufacturing, but both New Hampshire
and Delaware have deep, rich, broad manufacturing histories.
Manufacturing is commonly thought of by America as being associated
with Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan or Indiana, but there are dozens of
companies I have visited in Delaware that are small or medium-sized,
with 50 or 100 or 150 employees. Many companies are family owned, many
working in particular niches of processing or manufacturing. They are
profitable, growing, and looking to hire. Having visited New Hampshire
as well, it also has a proud and strong history of manufacturing. Given
the regional experience and the base of knowledge and expertise of
Members of this body, it is my hope that we can come together with
other bipartisan cosponsors to strengthen and build this bill going
forward.
Before I got into public service, I spent 8 years working for a
manufacturing company in Delaware, a materials-based science company
that manufactures over 1,000 different products, all off the same
chemical platform. One of the things I did in my work area was I
visited the dozens of manufacturing facilities that either the company
for which I worked directly operated or many of our partner companies
that were licensees or distributors or part of our supply chain.
The plant of today, the shop floor of today bears very little
resemblance to that of previous generations. They are the location of
rich innovation, an amazing amount of collaboration and teamwork where
world-class, cutting-edge quality control and continuous innovation are
expected, needed from our workforce, and thus investment in wages and
in skills is also a critical part of our continuing to be globally
competitive, as Senator Ayotte has explained.
As the skills needed for workers vary depending on the product and
market segment in the region, we also need training programs that are
flexible and meet the exact needs of the region. I will give two
examples. I have visited SPI Pharma in Lewes, DE, which manufactures
the key component of Maalox and many other antacids, and BASF in
Newport, which manufactures pigments. I hear similar challenges even
though they are in different areas of manufacturing. Their specific
needs are for process operators who are skilled at working at a factory
where large amounts of complex suspensions--liquids--are being mixed,
moved around, and fashioned into finished products. They need workers
who understand programmable logic control systems and can ensure that
continuous improvement in quality control is in place. They know that
in order to continue to grow, to export and be globally competitive,
they need to stay at the top of their game, which means investing in
workers and their skills. They are struggling to find young people to
replace those who are aging out of their workforces.
Our community college, Delaware Technical Community College, a
national leader, is helping and is actively engaged. But as the
equipment and processes of today's manufacturing plants become more
advanced and computerized, they will need help in keeping up with
changing technologies so the skills they train for today are the actual
skills that companies, such as SPI Pharma and BASF in Delaware, need in
this century.
The Manufacturing Skills Act could be a real help in Delaware to many
of the manufacturers I visited, and it will allow local and State
officials partnering with our schools, our Chamber leadership, and our
manufacturers to build a system that fits our real needs at the local
level.
I think it is exciting--whether someone is from New Hampshire,
Wisconsin, Delaware or Indiana--to know we are willing to come together
in a strong and bipartisan way to lay a pathway forward for America's
manufacturing workforce. It gives me some reason for optimism as we
begin to conclude this session of Congress and as we look forward.
I wish to close by specifically thanking Senator Ayotte for being
such a positive, forward-looking partner, not only on this bill but on
many other issues we have worked on together in the years we have
served so far in this body.
I would love to hear more from my colleague from New Hampshire about
the manufacturing challenges New Hampshire faces and how this bill
might address them and what our path forward is for this piece of
legislation.
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Ms. AYOTTE. I thank my colleague from Delaware.
As I look at the new Congress coming in, I view our bill--the
Manufacturing Skills Act--as an opportunity where we can all work
together to help workers and employers across the country meet the
challenges of ensuring that manufacturing continues to thrive and grow
in this country. These are good-paying jobs where the workers--who are
excellent and want the opportunity but just need the skills--need the
type of technology training and understanding of process, such as the
lean process, and how we can improve our manufacturing.
The bill Senator Coons and I worked on together will allow the local
decisionmakers to put together the best training that will help create
good-paying jobs, not only in Delaware, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin
but across this country.
I hope we can take up this bill very early on in the next session and
get behind it.
In New Hampshire, there are 66,000 jobs that are directly connected
and related to manufacturing. As I have traveled to visit manufacturing
employers throughout our State, I have been hearing about the same
issues that my colleague from Delaware has heard; that is, that they
are challenged in actually finding the right workforce for excellent-
paying jobs and opportunities, but they need partnerships and help to
get that trained workforce in place.
New Hampshire, similar to Delaware, has had some strong partnerships
among the private sector and community colleges in my State, and we
need to do more of that in the future. I believe our bill will allow
those local education institutions to partner with private employers
and State and local officials so the training is valuable and will
ensure that everyone has a stake in the right workforce going forward.
I wish to thank some of the businesses I have had the privilege of
visiting in our State. So many businesses have told me--whether it is
Burndy in Littleton or Velcro in Manchester or Codet in Colebrook or
Hypertherm in the Upper Valley--that our private sector is focusing on
this issue, and our Manufacturing Skills Act can help companies move
forward and ensure that our workers have the right skills so we can
grow jobs in this country.
I thank Senator Coons for his leadership on this issue and the work
he has done every single day in this body to ensure that the people of
Delaware have good-paying jobs and the right workforce training. This
is a goal I share with the Senator from Delaware.
I wish to also thank him for his leadership on other issues,
including the protection of this Nation and many other issues he has
become an expert on in this body.
I hope we can all get behind bipartisan solutions, such as that
offered by my colleague from Delaware, and I hope many of our
colleagues will think about joining us on this Manufacturing Skills
Act. As we go into the new Congress, I hope this will be a priority for
our leadership so we can bring this bill to the floor for a vote right
away.
I thank the Presiding Officer, and I thank my colleague from Delaware
for his leadership and work on this important issue. I look forward to
continuing to work on this until we get it passed.
Mr. COONS. I yield the floor.
Mr. TESTER. Are we in a quorum call?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. We are not.
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