Manufacturing jobs returning to US, Ohio
By Mark Williams
Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS
The jobs are coming home.
American companies that shipped work abroad now are starting to bring manufacturing jobs back to this country: Several hundred thousand manufacturing positions are expected to open in the United States in the next decade.
Already, big companies such as Ford and smaller ones such as the maker of EdenPure space heaters have returned production to Ohio or say they will.
To make space heaters, Suarez Corp. Industries brought 250 jobs from China to a building in North Canton once used by vacuum-maker Hoover Co.
The company’s expansion into other products also has added jobs at other companies that are supplying heater parts.
“This is stupid,” EdenPure creator Julius Toth said of making the heaters in Asia. “We need to be manufacturing in America.”
The shift of some manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. began only recently, but the idea has caught the eye of President Barack Obama, who mentioned it in his State of the Union speech.
Business leaders and economists credit the made-in-America-again trend to several factors: rising labor costs in China, increasing costs to ship products to the U.S., and the desire to more directly control the manufacturing process and the quality of the products.
At the same time, the cost of labor in the U.S. is going down, and state and local governments are sweetening the pot by offering tax incentives if companies add or retain jobs in communities.
Southern states, which don’t have a strong labor-union tradition, are more likely to benefit from this trend than Ohio and other parts of the Midwest, said economist Daniel Meges of Cleveland-based Chmura Economics & Analytics.
“The trick will be for smaller, more-nimble manufacturers based in Ohio to work their way into the supply chains of those manufacturing expansions that may take place in those southern U.S. states.”
Automakers, electronics companies and cookware manufacturers are among those bringing production back to the U.S. from abroad.
The job total in Ohio could end up being noteworthy.
Ford said it will move production from Mexico of its F-650 and F-750 trucks to its Avon Lake plant, part of a $128 million investment in the plant that will retain 1,400 jobs.
Appliance maker Whirlpool could add 65 jobs at Greenville, near Dayton, if it decides to shift hand-mixer production there. It has said that production of other small appliances could be returned from China.
The new owners of Horton Archery have shifted production of archery equipment from China to near Kent in Northeast Ohio. The move will mean about 20 jobs in Ohio, plus other jobs probably at surrounding businesses that supply parts to the company.