Where Have All The Foundries Gone?

Every so often I drive along the south shoreline of Muskegon Lake and worry a bit about this country. Abandoned jetties poke out into the lake like fingers all along the shore. In the 1880s each held a saw mill where millions of board feet of timber were cut into lumber to rebuild Chicago.
When the trees were gone, the sawmills went with them, out to the forests of the West Coast. In their place, over time, came foundries making use of the Lake Michigan beach sand and the largest deep water port on Lake Michigan.
During World War II, trainloads of tanks rolled through Muskegon. The tracks ran next to the loading docks of all these foundries; a new engine block was dropped into each tank or truck and sent on its way to battle. So huge was the level of production that Muskegon itself was sometimes called “the arsenal of Democracy.” Without towns like Muskegon the war might well have been lost.
Towns all over America, with their gritty factories and foundries and mills made America the unchallenged manufacturing giant of the planet. The wages they paid made us the richest, most consumer oriented society on any continent. We rebuilt much of the world after the war—with stuff coming out of those same foundries.
Today those fingers into Muskegon Lake are mostly barren. Humps of earth, a few pilings sticking out of the water. There’s a park here, a recently abandoned office building there, the local YMCA struggles to make a go of it on another jetty. But there are no foundries.
“We’re a service society”, I’m told. “We deal in data and computers.” A little voice in me asks, in the next major war, do we roll up hard copy from our printers and fire that at the enemy? It also asks, where did all those high paying jobs go?
Not to worry, I’m told. We do the brain work and let all those other third worlders do the scutt work in the hot and sooty factories. I remember when they packed up whole factories full of machinery and sent it overseas where people earned a tenth what an American was paid.
(Then suddenly the brain work went overseas to huge research facilities in China, Ireland and India, to name a few. What happened to all the guys who could speak English while they fixed my computer—and who lived in places like Oregon and Georgia? They didn’t limit their solutions to “Please reinstall your operating system.”
It became fashionable to snicker at “the rust belt” as factory after factory was pulled down to be replaced by expensive homes and malls. I used to wonder as I drove past, don’t we really need factories and foundries anymore?
This week’s “BusinessWeek” suggests that all of a sudden we’re finding that maybe we do. “Can the Future Be Built in America?” (9/21—p.046). There’s a high tech company in California that has a reasonable hope of revolutionizing electric lights, cutting the cost to a fraction of today's cost.It would like to keep its manufacturing in the US—if only to protect its trade secrets.
But large government subsidies in places like Singapore, China and Malaysia make it almost suicidal to build another plant here. We have the highest taxes on manufacturing in the world.
We’ve sent high tech business after high tech business overseas (federally funded research created most solar cell technology—we now hold five percent of the $30 billion business). Congress views subsidies for manufacturing as “welfare for the rich” and will have no part of it..
By now we don’t even have the infrastructure, trained people and suppliers left in this country to make high tech work in many areas. So I guess Muskegon isn’t alone in having bare ground where once there were producing factories. (Can Walmart hire all of us?)
Congress has a choice. Put its money into people and plants that provide jobs—as it did with computers and, before that, the steel industry—or put its money into welfare for the unemployed. That might be just as important as health care.