Manufacturing Skills Act

Floor Speech

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 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.

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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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