Manufacturing - The Key to Economic Growth

Lee Swindall, VP for Business and Industry, WEDC

As I leave WMEP to take up my new role as VP for Business and Industry with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, I wanted to impart a few final words to our clients, our many partners and our supporters in Wisconsin.

During the three years of my tenure at WMEP, I have witnessed many transformations. I have seen WMEP transform from a provider of Lean Manufacturing services into an organization that now truly lives and breathes the Six Success Attributes of Next Generation Manufacturing in the provision of assistance to the small and midsize manufacturers in Wisconsin.

During my first week with WMEP in September 2008, the deepest – some say darkest – recession in 50 years began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, spawning a contagion of bad debt defaults, near-defaults and rapid economic contraction.

Having spent the better part of three years working through decelerating demand, capital contraction and extreme global volatility, the manufacturing sector of the state continues to be the engine that is powering economic growth, however anemic it may be. 

Though nearly forgotten over the past ten years in talk about the new knowledge economy, manufacturing has spared Wisconsin, and the US at large, from a much worse fate that would have been suffered without a vibrant manufacturing sector. Suddenly, manufacturing matters again.

This is an object lesson in the importance of manufacturing to Wisconsin and it economic future. We need to pay more attention, not less, to this driver of economic health that constitutes one-fifth of the Gross Domestic Product of Wisconsin and employs some 460,000 workers.

Unlike the companies now drawing the most attention in the latest wave of the technology boom – those that produce some web-enabled platform for consumer advertising – the manufacturers of this state produce goods and materials that add value. They don’t spend their effort and investment figuring out ways to induce buyers to part with their money through targeted advertising promotion. Instead, they focus upon creating unique key value that is genuinely useful to their customers. Despite this, manufacturing attracts a mere fraction of the investment capital that flows into the web-sphere.

Wisconsin has one of the greatest densities of manufacturers of any state in the US and a bigger percent of its workforce is employed in manufacturing than almost any other state. Our best hope of a vigorous and sustained recovery will come from a revitalized and growing manufacturing sector that is a priority focus of Wisconsin’s economic strategy in the years ahead.

Over the next decade Wisconsin’s economic future will, to a large extent, be shaped by the growth in manufacturing – both in depth and diversity of the industries. We have the opportunity to invest in existing and emergent industries and to have the economic development policies and best-practices to fuel such growth. Given the intensifying competitive pressures in the global economy, the time to seize this opportunity is now.