Washington

New York state is a surprising beneficiary of an uptick in reshoring — jobs coming back to the U.S. from overseas — as well as direct investment by foreign nations.

Data analysis by the Reshoring Initiative, a non-profit business advisory group that promotes returning offshored jobs to America, shows that from 2010 through 2018, New York came in at No. 8 in the nation with approximately 31,500 jobs created through reshoring and foreign investment.

In 2018 alone, New York ranked No. 10 in reshored jobs with 2,657. It was the only state in the Northeast to make the top 10, with the balance including job powerhouses like Texas and a few hard-hit Midwestern states like Ohio and Michigan.

‘Our goal is not to be biggest guy on the block, but we want to be a nice stable American brand that’s profitable,” said Greg Owens, CEO of Sherrill Manufacturing in the Oneida County community of Sherrill, who along with a partner took over the Oneida factory when the traditional silverware giant stopped production in 2005.

Oneida couldn’t beat underpricing by Chinese competitors.

But Owens, who managed the Oneida plant in Toluca, Mexico, said he and his partner, Sherrill native Matthew Roberts, survived by formulating a new business strategy based on their Liberty Tabletop web sales and limited retail sales.

“We want to do something we can be proud of,” he said. “We’re making a living, but it’s also a cause.”

The upward reshoring trend comes after decades of jobs headed in the other direction — offshore. Upstate has suffered a double-whammy of sorts, losing its textile and carpet-making jobs through the 1970s, and then a wide variety of other manufacturing in the 1990s and 2000s after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization — which cost the U.S. more than 3 million jobs.

Manufacturing in New York fell by 36.5 percent between 2001 and 2017, according to the Public Policy Institute of New York State. That was 12 percentage points higher than the national figure of 24.3 percent.

In 2016, President Donald Trump campaigned vigorously on bringing jobs back to the U.S. from overseas. And he regularly praises himself for job growth, crediting his tariffs and tariff threats as well as the GOP tax bill in 2017 that lowered corporate rates to 21 percent.

Advocates and experts say that while Trump deserves credit for putting job restoration front and center, the numbers were rising before he took office.

The Reshoring Initiative’s annual report for 2018 concludes that U.S. manufacturing job loss and job growth reached equilibrium in 2015 and that 2016 was the first year in decades that job influx exceeded job outflow.

“The U.S. had gone from losing net about 220,000 manufacturing jobs per year at the beginning of the last decade to adding net 30,000 jobs in 2016,” the report stated.

Experts also say some of Trump’s hardline policies, particularly on tariffs and integration, ultimately could prove counterproductive.

“Some decisions this administration has made ... have benefited businesses, for sure, but others have created tension and uncertainty,” said Michael Lobsinger, senior vice president at the Albany-based Center for Economic Growth. “Reshoring is great, but everything has to come together. When you have low unemployment, you need skilled immigrant labor. The danger is that without a skilled pool of workers, this could come to a screeching halt.”

At first glance, New York may seem an unlikely destination for manufacturers bringing back jobs from overseas.

Fairly or not, the state has long held a reputation for being business unfriendly, because of high taxes and stringent regulation. And New York’s minimum wage, set to eventually reach $15 an hour upstate, set off a chorus of groans and dire predictions by employers.

But New York, particularly upstate, may make sense to manufacturers for a variety of other reasons.

Its workforce is generally well educated, particularly when compared to states in low-wage regions such as the South and Southwest. And New York has a long manufacturing history, with blue-collar factory work viewed as providing a secure hold on middle-class status.

“If you bring something to New York, you stand a good chance of finding someone who can make it,” said Harry Moser, a long-time executive who founded the Reshoring Initiative to promote job returning as well as to advise businesses on whether moving production back home makes economic sense.

“Upstate has a history and legacy of doing this kind of work," Moser added. "The pool is richer than it would be in an agricultural-type state that never had much manufacturing to begin with.”

The initiative’s web site, reshorenow.org, includes a “Total Cost of Ownership Estimator,” a free online tool that helps manufacturers input data in order to see how staying overseas might compare to bringing production the U.S. Wages are a part of the overall calculation, but so is transportation, duties and the hard-to-quantify benefit of having U.S.-made inventory readily available versus the long lead time needed to get stocks replenished from overseas.

Reshoring is more appealing now than in the past because wages in China have gone up 10-15 percent and web sales are cheaper than shipping costs from overseas, Moser said. Both offset the higher wages paid in the U.S.

Also, there is the intangible benefit of being able to say “Made in the U.S.A.”

“Consumers recognize the economy has been hollowed out, largely because manufacturing was lost offshore,” Moser said. “People say it’s good for the economy, it’s a higher quality product, and there’s no slave labor. You hear all of that.”

It may be an unintended irony that the main promotor of job growth and reshoring — President Trump — is also the author of policies that arguably undermine those objectives, and possibly throw the economy into a recession.

“Tariffs may turn out to be a master stroke, if Trump gets China to change its behavior,” said Moser. “But China has a thousand-year perspective and Trump has to get elected next year.”

He added: “He started this game, so he’s got to finish it and get the benefit. If he doesn’t, it will probably cost him the election.”

dan@hearstdc.com