"Despite these hurdles, manufacturers in the U.S. and their employees are doing remarkable work"
About this Quote
John Engler speaks from a vantage shaped by Michigan, a state synonymous with factory floors, and by his later stewardship of national business groups. The phrasing begins with concession and ends with affirmation: an acknowledgment of obstacles followed by a vote of confidence. Hurdles encompasses a familiar set of pressures on American manufacturing over the past few decades: offshoring and fierce global competition, volatile energy and commodity prices, health care and regulatory costs, supply chain shocks, and a persistent skills gap. By naming the difficulties without dwelling on them, the sentence positions resilience as the core of the story.
The emphasis on both manufacturers and their employees is deliberate. It yokes executive decisions and shop-floor expertise, countering a simplistic narrative that views manufacturing as either managerial strategy or labor muscle. The claim of remarkable work points to gains that are easy to overlook: rising output per worker, the quiet spread of automation and advanced materials, lean processes that wring waste from production, and a wave of small and mid-sized firms customizing high-value products. It also nods to workforce adaptation, from apprenticeships and community-college partnerships to veterans retraining and midcareer workers learning to program robots or run data-driven quality systems.
As rhetoric, the line tries to reframe decline-era fatalism. Employment has fallen even as output has grown, which can obscure the ingenuity still occurring on factory floors. Engler links morale and policy: if progress happens despite the hurdles, imagine the potential with smarter infrastructure, streamlined rules, and stronger talent pipelines. The sentence functions as praise and as pressure, signaling to policymakers that the sector is already delivering and to the public that manufacturing is not a relic but a complex, evolving engine. It compresses a broader thesis into one balance: sober about the headwinds, confident about the capacity to innovate and compete.
The emphasis on both manufacturers and their employees is deliberate. It yokes executive decisions and shop-floor expertise, countering a simplistic narrative that views manufacturing as either managerial strategy or labor muscle. The claim of remarkable work points to gains that are easy to overlook: rising output per worker, the quiet spread of automation and advanced materials, lean processes that wring waste from production, and a wave of small and mid-sized firms customizing high-value products. It also nods to workforce adaptation, from apprenticeships and community-college partnerships to veterans retraining and midcareer workers learning to program robots or run data-driven quality systems.
As rhetoric, the line tries to reframe decline-era fatalism. Employment has fallen even as output has grown, which can obscure the ingenuity still occurring on factory floors. Engler links morale and policy: if progress happens despite the hurdles, imagine the potential with smarter infrastructure, streamlined rules, and stronger talent pipelines. The sentence functions as praise and as pressure, signaling to policymakers that the sector is already delivering and to the public that manufacturing is not a relic but a complex, evolving engine. It compresses a broader thesis into one balance: sober about the headwinds, confident about the capacity to innovate and compete.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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