Jennifer Granholm Quotes

America, the temple of invention and industry, doesn't make things anymore.

Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing capacity.

There is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.

At a time when we are losing manufacturing jobs in this country, we should be doing everything we can to help our manufacturers stay competitive. They are the backbone of our economy.

In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premium for low-skilled workers in manufacturing is smaller than it once was.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

America's moved so much of its production and manufacturing offshore, it's become a nation of middlemen.

High-profile industry disruptions such as steel or car plant closures attract much media and political attention.

Beneficial in theory, so-called free trade agreements far too often have been detrimental to the United States economy and the manufacturing sector that forms its central pillar.

Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

… failing factories

I have lived my whole life just outside Youngstown, Ohio. We watched the steel mills close and 50,000 jobs disappear in the late 1970s. We watched businesses move overseas throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

Everyone is concerned about manufacturing in this country.

Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.

China is crippling our manufacturing economy and eliminating our jobs by illegally flooding our markets.

Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

Since 2000, we have lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, of which 500,000 jobs were in high-tech industries such as telecommunications and electronics.

When I was starting, there were wool mills in the U.S. that could make you anything. The U.S. used to produce the most beautiful cotton denim in the world. Now all that is gone.

You cannot buy an American telephone, TV set or VCR. This is a part of America that has gone abroad and will never come back again.

Free tariff or no tariff would close up our manufactories by the scores.

Many large corporations in the last 20 years have decided that their business plan is to shut down manufacturing in Dayton and Toledo and move it to Wuhan and Shenzhen. And then they will sell products back into the United States. It’s a betrayal of this country and a betrayal of the middle class.

A lot of the factories that had been the bedrock of many small cities were being shut down, which led me to investigate what I'm calling the 'de-industrial revolution.'

Technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining. There is no way that Trump can bring significant numbers of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.