Rockwell Automation still has a production facility in the Milwaukee area, at an industrial park in a suburb called Mequon. Here, machines print circuit boards embedded with microprocessors containing software coded by Rockwell developers. The circuit boards are then fitted into variable-speed drives, electric motors built to carry specific loads as efficiently as possible. Workers assembling the drives are as likely to spend their shifts peering at data on a computer screen as they are wielding drills.

While the shop floor employs 350 people, the facility also houses 750 workers whose jobs range from marketing to procurement to engineering. The presence of higher-level expertise makes this facility a hub for service and repair work. "We love it because when we have a problem on the shop floor, I can grab an engineer by the ear," says Thomas Groose, manufacturing engineering manager. Most of the folks working on the shop floor hail from the suburbs. "We're not on a bus line here," Groose notes.

Manufacturing remains an important sector in Milwaukee, employing some 14 percent of the metro area workforce. In Wisconsin, manufacturing accounts for about 18 percent of state GDP and 93 percent of exports, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

But the city and the state have seen a steep decline in manufacturing jobs over the past half-century, and the kind of jobs that remain require a higher level of expertise. Between 1961 and 2001, the city of Milwaukee lost 69 percent of its manufacturing positions. Some of that work relocated to suburbs like Mequon. But overall, the seven counties in southeastern Wisconsin saw a loss of 83,000 jobs, according to Vanderwalle & Associates, a Wisconsin economic strategy firm.

Many jobs disappeared altogether, as high-tech equipment replaced manual labor. The jobs that remain increasingly require applicants to present a two-year degree or a specific certification. Today, fewer than 40 percent of U.S. manufacturing employees have jobs in actual production, according to the Congressional Research Service. The loss of manufacturing jobs had devastating impact on Milwaukee. Like other post-industrial cities, Milwaukee has suffered decades of economic decline and a spike in inner-city unemployment. Today, the city of Milwaukee has the lowest employment rate for working-age African-American males of any city in the country--worse even than Detroit, according to research from Professor Marc Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The manufacturing jobs that remain are largely suburban and inaccessible by public transportation, putting them out of reach for the population that needs them the most.

Making factories more productive is Rockwell Automation's business, and executives there find the media focus on job loss frustrating. "We'd like you to start talking about output, and judge manufacturing based on how much stuff we make, not on how many jobs," says John Bernaden, director of external communications. He points to figures illustrating a 15 percent productivity increase in American manufacturing since 2009 and 16 percent output growth.