“Made in the U.S.A.” has been in decline for decades, but in the last few years it has shown signs of an incipient comeback. Even as the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased, manufacturing output—the value of goods made here—has increased substantially. We still make $5.4 trillion worth of stuff annually here, and 12.4 million Americans still work in the manufacturing sector. But Trump administration tariffs, speculation about a trade war, and the continued march toward automation make the future of American manufacturing less certain.



For this special report, we surveyed 26 of the largest manufacturers in the country—and a few smaller ones, because their perspective is important—for their thoughts, concerns, and predictions. Their answers to 11 big questions tell us a lot about what lies ahead.

No. 1: What Is the Biggest Advantage to Manufacturing in the United States?

The Consensus: Being close to customers lets companies get products out quickly without blowing their margins. Plus it means getting feedback directly from the people who buy those items (and maybe even ­ hiring a few), which makes the ­products better.

What the companies said:

Nalgene: Speed. There’s a lot of times where retailers are like, “Hey guys, we have a promotion and we need you to ship in three weeks.” Our competitive set, they obviously have to ship from overseas, and they’re not able to react as quickly as we can.

Sierra Nevada: With beer, being close to the consumer is important. Not having long transit times, being able to control the routes to distribution. We ship our beer refrigerated. Doing that from a foreign country is pretty costly.

Stihl: Manufacturing here gives us the ability to quickly and easily adapt to changing supply and demand and respond to the customer with new innovations.

Polaris: It’s a tremendous workforce. Our 11,000 employees are crazy competitive. We’re also close to our customers: About 80 percent of our volume is sold here.

Zippo: When we ship products into China, Europe, there’s a duty on it, there’s logistics costs. The quality has to be impeccable for customers to pay that premium value for the name. To try and develop that in Shenzhen, there’s just no way we could provide that level of oversight.

Airstream is committed to producing only in America. Airstream

Airstream: The U.S. is the largest RV market in the world. Let’s say we went to China and utilized lower-cost labor to build our product. It would cost a lot of money to ship it back to the U.S., so what you might gain in labor overseas, you would lose in shipping.

Lodge: In the retail market, so many of the dealers and distributors don’t have warehousing because of the cost of maintaining facilities and the quickness of the way products are moving off the shelves. So the quicker we can get products to them, the better off we are.

Createch: We make custom machinery, and that requires a lot of interface with the customer and the customer’s engineers. That would be difficult to do if we were manufacturing offshore.

Tempur-Sealy: Demand can be pretty variable, and a long lead time offshore in supply chain makes reacting more difficult.

Glebar: The collection of people we have over here from all over the place, with different experiences, and there’s a lot of sharing of information. So there’s this kind of dynamic creativity that happens here that you don’t see at many other places in the world. This encouragement to think out of the box and just completely go for it, it’s an inherent American thing. It’s this hunger. There’s no fear in trying to push the envelope.

No. 2: What Is the Biggest Challenge to Manufacturing in the U.S.?

The Consensus: The skills gap—young workers’ lack of proficiency in traditional skills—is a problem. That, combined with the fact that labor costs tend to be significantly higher in the U.S. than abroad, makes developing a workforce harder than it should be.

What the companies said:

Fiesta: Our turnover is relatively high. We’re in an area of the country where manufacturing, by our view, is dying. There’s an ethane cracker plant being built about seven miles away from us, and they’re talking about building another 20 miles down the river. The younger labor force is going to go there—where the job is a little more lucrative, a little better paying. Plus, the cities we’re located near have gotten smaller as they got older. East Liverpool, Ohio—which is right across the river in one of the areas where we attract our workforce—used to have 25,000 residents. It’s more like 10,000 now. On top of that, we’re competing against companies using product that’s made in the third-world market that perhaps is made by people who are making low wages with minimal or no healthcare costs. For us, we live in a pretty decent area of the country. Our labor costs are not exorbitant, but they’re not at the low end of the scale. Something that’s not uncommon for just about any company doing business in the United States today is the runaway healthcare costs.

Nalgene: Our cost structure is pretty good, but when you compare our costs manufacturing in the States compared to manufacturing in China, there’s no doubt it’s higher.

Briggs & Stratton: We’re not always able to find employees to match the skill sets we need, so we work with high schools, colleges, and technician schools to help train our workforce. That’s not just a problem for us, it’s a problem for most manufacturers with U.S. operations. Filling the skills gap is important for the U.S. to compete in the global marketplace.

Polaris provides training and equipment to local high schools. Polaris

Polaris: The regulatory burden. It’s gotten better under the new administration, but it’s real. We don’t face those burdens in other places. And then finding the right skilled workforce has been problematic. In 2014, for example, we were paying almost $100 an hour to bring people up from all over the country to assemble vehicles in Roseau, Minnesota. It’s a small, rural community and we just could not find workers. In many of our communities we partner with the local high schools. We actually donate welding machines to the high schools so that we can train people to be ready to be employees at Polaris. That’s a little bit of the way we get ahead of the curve.

Airstream: Younger folks in the U.S. are not really targeting manufacturing as a career. That’s a challenge, just trying to make sure the younger generations are as good as the older generations at building things, because we’re such a handcrafted product.

Glebar: The schooling. In the States, the mindset is, if you get out of high school, you have to go to college, whether you’re into it or not. The stigma is that manufacturing is dirty and it’s not technology-based—even though we’re using a ton of technology, and our work is a very good challenge for a lot of people.

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Intel: It takes a lot of education and advocacy for government officials at the federal level to understand what we do and how critical the systems are. The R&D tax credit is extremely helpful to us. The recent tax changes, in terms of reducing the rate and taxing our foreign-producing competition differently, is a major benefit. That keeps us here.

Campbell Grinder: Overseas competitors have the means to apply tariffs, even if they don’t call them that, and the regulatory environment in the U.S. has been unfavorable to manufacturing for decades.

Createch: The biggest challenge in the machine-tool industry is the aging workforce.

Sikorsky: Getting skilled labor—for CNC operation, for example—that can evolve as our technologies evolve will be our biggest challenge. Our newest systems integrate software and mechanical operations, so having a workforce that can understand and work seamlessly across different disciplines will be the key.

No. 3: What Parts of the Job Do People Like Most Or Dislike Most?

The Consensus: Manufacturing still means shift work, which remains repetitive, tiring, and tedious.

What the companies said:

Nalgene: People take a lot of pride in the fact that the stuff they’re working on could actually end up in a lab that ends up helping a relative or a friend who is in a hospital, or who is being treated for a disease. Most, if not all, of the people here have pride around that fact that we do really manufacture stuff that helps science.

Polaris: Ironically, one of the jobs you’d think would be a premium role is testing our vehicles. You take a vehicle out and you run it around the track or on the trail for quite some time, over and over again. But people go out there day after day after day, riding the same vehicle on the same trail in the worst weather you can possibly imagine. They trade that pretty quickly for a job on the assembly line.

Stranahan’s: We are 24 hours a day, six days a week. Every two months you rotate between shifts: 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., and 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. It’s ­difficult to shift every two months, but it’s the only way we can keep people from being stuck on a night shift or an afternoon shift permanently.

Lodge: It’s hard to get people to want to be out there working. The temperature outside, that’s the temperature inside. And it’s ten-hour shifts. But we’ve changed some things. This may sound minor, but in the distribution center, you used to have to wear long pants. It’s really hot in there, so now we let people wear shorts.

No. 4: What Percentage of the Jobs on the Floor Require Trade School or a Professional Certification?

“For the most part, if you’re coming in as an operator, we’re looking for people to have a high school education,” Cummins told us. “We’re not looking for postsecondary education for most of these jobs. We can train in our distribution centers or factories or in laboratory settings.”

That held true for most companies. At 37 percent, Briggs & Stratton cited the highest figure for the part of its manufacturing positions requiring advanced training or formal education. Instead, most employers ready workers with on-the-job training. Stihl explained this approach as a way to avoid limiting its candidate pool while also making itself a more appealing employer—one that invests heavily in its workers.

This encouragement to think out of the box and just go for it, it’s an inherent American thing."

Companies were similarly ambivalent about professional certifications, seeing them as nice to have, not need to have. At least for most employees. Createch told us, “We prefer to have the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council certification, but we’re not requiring any of our operators to have it.” At Lodge, shift managers and other management-level employees undergo metallurgical training through the American Foundry Society to help them better understand the science behind the company’s products.

No. 5: What’s the Ratio of Men to Women on the Production Line?

Men still dominate, but at many companies, women are catching up.

Popular Mechanics

No. 6: Have You Made Any Changes or Added Any Innovations to Production?

The Consensus: Automation has been the big change: More parts of the manufacturing process are handled by machines (often under human supervision).

What the companies said:

Sierra Nevada’s 10,000 solar panels help power its factory. Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada: Over the last ten years, we’ve installed more than 10,000 solar panels at the Chico facility. We’ve got a large on-site composting system for our restaurant waste and food scraps. We put in fuel cells to generate a megawatt of power, and we just updated those to ten small gas turbines and a Tesla battery bank. So we’re currently producing close to 100 percent of our own power on site, as well as producing biogas—sort of a large anaerobic digester that’s digesting our wastewater, which supplements our boiler feed.

Ford: We have added 3D printers in a number of our plants. That’s a big change from traditional methods, which can take eight to 16 weeks and more than $250,000 in tooling just to produce a prototype part. Using the 3D printer, we can design and print a part in days or even hours.

Stihl: One simple example is using robots to stack completed boxes of products onto pallets. This reduces the chance of repetitive motion stress on the ­worker.

Briggs & Stratton: Many of our robots and machining lines are connected to the Cloud, reporting data such as electrical current flow and operating temperature. That can tell us if a machine is running too hot or if its cutting tool is wearing out prematurely.

Zippo: Years ago, we used to have artists that would sit behind a board and actually draw the artwork, and then redraw it to fit and format it onto the lighter. That artwork would then be turned into film, and the film would be turned into screens, and the screens would be separated by colors, and every screen that went on would have to be cured and baked. Today, we use digital printing. It’s improved our ability to make smaller runs—you don’t have to carry as much inventory, and you can turn things around much quicker.

Airstream: Each rivet hole used to be hand-drilled, and each window was hand cut, hand scribed. Now all of those rivet holes are predrilled and the windows are precut on very sophisticated routers. We’ve made similar improvements in our chassis. All of that really helps our tolerances in the repeatability and gives our skilled labor a better chance of success.

Allen Edmonds: There’s not a lot of difference between 1965 and 2018 as far as machinery. The equipment was made to last. They’re not simple to work on, though. We have a great maintenance department here. We do have bar codes on each of our shoes coming down the line. They help us track quality issues, if a shoe gets hung up on production some place. All of that information is tied into the system in real time, so we can see what’s happening on the floor at central points on LCD screens.

MasterCraft: Five or six years ago, we cut our bulk materials (fiberglass, vinyl, etc.) by hand using manual overlay patterns. That’s all been automated now.

Cummins: In the past, we would test diesel engines through hot testing: put it in a test cell, attach coolant to it, attach fuel to it, start it up, and run the engine. You get it hot, just like you were starting your car or truck and running it around the highway for 20 or 30 minutes. Now the verification of those products is done through cold tests and in-process quality verification. You don’t even have to start the engine. We just attach to the engine and spin it, and through different torque sensors and different ways of verification, we can verify the quality of the engine without ever having to put fuel in and start it.

Sikorsky: One time, one of our workers was at a veterinarian’s office and saw one of those dog funnels. He extrapolated that idea to a way to protect harnesses, came back, described the idea to our engineers, and we were using it on the factory floor within a week.

No. 7: Are Most of Your Factory Workers Long-Time Employees or Recent Hires?

Workers who got into manufacturing in earlier decades found stable careers with good benefits. So, Peterbilt told us, “We don’t lose a lot of people.” Companies with lots of younger workers tend to be dominant employers in small towns or to have gone through recent expansions. Airstream—which has 11 employees with more than four decades of seniority—said a mix of generations makes a rich workforce: “With our growth since the recession, we’ve added more millennials. They now make up more of our workforce than any other group. The millennials seem to really appreciate the more tenured folks teaching them how to do it, and the older folks have really looked to the millennials in trying to think of ways to do things differently.”

No. 8: What’s the Toughest Job to Fill on the Factory Floor?

Employers lamented the decline of skilled trades. Carhartt can’t find pattern makers; Stihl said it could take seven months just to find a tool-and-die-maker ­candidate. These jobs have somehow lost their appeal, though they still pay well. Merck’s trouble is control technicians—one of the highest-paying hourly jobs it offers.

No. 9: How Many People’s Hands Go into Making the Product from Start to Finish?

The Consensus: The number of people it takes to make a ­product has less to do with its complexity than with the variety of specialties required to create its constituent parts.

What the companies say:

Stihl: The FS 131 is our most labor-intensive chainsaw. Forty-six people cooperate in building it.



Caterpillar: For a 37-ton wheel loader, 344.

Zippo: Each lighter passes between an average of ten to 15 sets of hands, depending on how many decorating processes are used on the particular lighter. Something special, like a solid 18K gold lighter, might only have one to two skilled engineers handling its creation.

Allen Edmonds: Of the 212 steps in our process, 211 are by a person. There’s probably 60 people who handle a shoe to create a final product.

Lodge: Forty.

Fender: One hundred seventy.

Fiesta: Okay, so we have the clay. The mold. The tool. The jiggerman. The stripper (the pottery kind). Then we have the handler. And then we have the wearboy. Then that handle that went on the cup, also we had a caster and a handle-­finisher. Then we leave that area. We go to the glazing area, and we have a handle painter, a flusher, brusher, dipper, brusher, and a placer. A drawer. A wear selector. And then a packer. That’s if it’s not decorated. So 18 people minimum, that touched one cup. If it’s undecorated.

Carhartt: Depending on complexity of design, anywhere from 20 to 40.

No. 10: How Many Robots Does a Factory Worker Interact with on a Shift?

The Consensus: Many companies suggested the number of robots in their factories is lower than you might expect. They’ve mostly taken over in places where precision is of the utmost importance—or where humans might get injured.

What the companies say:

Stihl: We are four to five times more automated than a typical U.S. manufacturer of the same size. We have about 155 robots for 2,000 employees. We also have 15 laser-guided-­vehicle forklifts that provide just-in-time automatic-assembly-line delivery. No full-time employee has ever been let go due to automation.

Nalgene: Even the bottles that are being injection-blown-molded, there’s somebody there paying attention to the machine, watching it and inspecting it. On any given run, you’re probably going to have three people there that are monitoring the process, actually touching the product.

Ford: At our Kentucky Truck Plant, we recently invested more than $900 million to build the new Expedition and Navigator. When we transformed the body shop, we added approximately 400 new robots. In general, they increase line speed while keeping employees safe from repetitive-motion injuries. The plant also added a robot lab, where employees can test out software tweaks or troubleshoot issues away from the factory floor.

Zippo uses a machine that can engrave the entire surface of a lighter. Zippo

Zippo: It used to take a decade to make a million lighters. Now, we make a million in a month. One new machine does the 360 engraving, in which we coat the entire lighter with an engraving. It requires very little interface with an operator. It runs basically lights-out on the third shift. If there’s an issue, it dings and a technician gets called, but that does not happen very often.

Carhartt: None. Automation in apparel production is particularly difficult. Unlike plastics or metals, fabric easily deforms and compresses, making precise control difficult.

Sierra Nevada: Beer is really about being accurate and repeatable with things like weights and temperatures and pressures, so in some of those areas having automation is a real advantage for gaining consistency. We still have a lot of artistic input with recipe formulation and raw-material selection.

Caterpillar: We fabricate our own structures for machines we produce. We use robots for that. They weld more accurately and faster than humans, at a higher heat. We have 15 robots running on two or three shifts. One person manages those robots. We’re going to have 400 folks working and 20- to 30-some on the fab side that interact with one robot on their shift.

Merck: We have some facilities within the company, for example at our plants in West Point, Pennsylvania, and Durham, North Carolina, where we actually have robots that are directly part of the vaccine-manufacturing process. So people that work in that area interact with the robots on a very regular basis. Those robots were specifically installed because they help us maintain sterility.

Allen Edmonds: We use robotics in the hand-burnishing part of the process. It’s a protective spray to keep the waxes inside the leather stable.

Peterbilt: We have about 160 lift-assist devices, which assist people with heavier parts. About 12 years ago, our paint systems switched to robotics. Six years ago we started building the cabs robotically, too.

Fender: A very small part of the process is automated with robots, and it’s only in paint. We do it in undercoat and for our topcoat, to minimize variation.

Hangar 1: In the actual distillery, we don’t use much automated equipment. For safety, the less electronics in the environment we’re in, where there’s alcohol vapors, is important.

No. 11: In 20 Years, Will Your Facilities Be Where They Are Now?

The Consensus: Overwhelmingly, the answer is yes­—especially for smaller, older companies. Several manufacturers pointed to investment in their American facilities as evidence of their longevity: With the equipment involved in manufacturing most products, once it’s in place, it’s not simple to pick up and move.

What the companies say:

Nalgene: Twenty years is a massive time horizon, just based on the life we live with technology and how fast information flows, but we’re not going anywhere in the short or medium term. We are growing quickly in both Europe and Asia. But we come back to the fact that Made in the U.S.A. is one of the most fundamental tenets of our company, so we don’t really want to manufacture anywhere else.

Zippo: Mr. Blaisdell, the inventor, the founder of the company, said, “The day we have to make our lighter outside this country, outside this town, I’ll lock the doors and shut it down.”

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Polaris: Absolutely. We are very committed to the concept of lean manufacturing. And lean manufacturing almost mandates that you’re going to stay close to your customer.

Airstream: Say we grow in size so much this little community can’t support us from a labor-pool standpoint. Then we might open an additional factory in the United States. But production will always be in America.

Glebar: We outgrew the original location and moved in 2015. We are outgrowing this one, too, unfortunately. So we’re looking at outsourcing some of the components that get used on our machines. We started locally and now we’re branching out, but trying to keep it in the States as much as we can.

Hangar 1: We just finished building a brand-new distillery. We moved into our current facility in 2014, and we plan to stay here for quite a while.

Campbell Grinder: The company is the people. If you moved it, you’d have nothing more than a customer base and no one to build the machine.

The Companies We Surveyed:

Airstream

Founded: 1931

Makes: Travel trailers

U.S. factory: ­Jackson Center, Ohio

Manufacturing jobs: 761

Allen Edmonds

Founded: 1922

Makes: Shoes and men’s apparel

U.S. factory: Port Washington, Wis.

Manufacturing jobs: 345

Briggs & Stratton

Founded: 1908

Makes: Small engines

U.S. factories: 8

Manufacturing jobs: 2,300

Campbell Grinder

Founded: 1969

Makes: Grinders

U.S. factory: Spring Lake, Mich.

Manufacturing jobs: 24

Carhartt

Founded: 1889

Makes: Work apparel

U.S. factories: Edmonton, Ky.; Irvine, Ky.; Madisonville, Ky.; Camden, Tenn.

Manufacturing jobs: 1,100

Caterpillar

Founded: 1925

Makes: Construction and mining machines

U.S. factories: 51

Manufacturing jobs: Not available

Createch

Founded: 2006

Makes: Industrial tools

U.S. factories: Lakeland, Fla.; ­ Rockford, Ill.

Manufacturing jobs: 35

Cummins

Founded: 1919

Makes: Diesel engines

U.S. factories: 11

Manufacturing jobs: 9,500

Fender

Founded: 1946

Makes: Electric guitars

U.S. factory: Corona, Calif.

Manufacturing jobs: About 500

Fiesta

Founded: 1871

Makes: Dinnerware

U.S. factory: Newell, W. Va.

Manufacturing jobs: 550

Ford

Founded: 1903

Makes: Automobiles

U.S. factories: 24

Manufacturing jobs: 56,000

Glebar

Founded: 1952

Makes: Precision grinders

U.S. factory: Ramsey, N.J.

Manufacturing jobs: 60

Hangar 1

Founded: 2001

Makes: Craft vodka

U.S. factory: Alameda, Calif.

Manufacturing jobs: 9

Intel

Founded: 1968

Makes: Microchips

U.S. factories: Hillsboro, Ore.; Chandler, Ariz.; Ocatillo, Ariz.; Rio Rancho, N.M.

Manufacturing jobs: Not available

Lodge

Founded: 1896

Makes: Cookware

U.S. factory: South Pittsburg, Tenn.

Manufacturing jobs: 400

MasterCraft

Founded: 1968

Makes: Boats

U.S. factory: Vonore, Tenn.

Manufacturing jobs: 500

Merck

Founded: 1917

Makes: Pharmaceuticals

U.S. factories: 9

Manufacturing jobs: 21,000

Nalgene

Founded: 1949

Makes: Water bottles

U.S. factory: ­Fairport, N.Y.

Manufacturing jobs: 250

Peterbilt

Founded: 1939

Makes: Big rigs

U.S. factory: ­Denton, Texas

Manufacturing jobs: 1,900

Polaris

Founded: 1954

Makes: ATVs, snowmobiles, motorcycles

U.S. factories: 10

Manufacturing jobs: 4,000-plus

Sierra Nevada

Founded: 1980

Makes: Beer

U.S. factories: Chico, Calif.; Mills River, N.C.

Manufacturing jobs: 191

Sikorsky

Founded: 1923

Makes: Helicopters

U.S. factories: Stratford, Conn.; Coatesville, Pa.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; Troy, Ala.

Manufacturing jobs: 5,000

Stihl

Founded: 1974

Makes: Power tools

U.S. factory: ­Virginia Beach, Va.

Manufacturing jobs: 1,700

Stranahan's

Founded: 2004

Makes: Craft whiskey

U.S. factory: ­Denver, Colo.

Manufacturing jobs: 20

Tempur Sealy

Founded: 1881 (Sealy) and 1992 (Tempur-Pedic)

Makes: Mattresses

U.S. factories: 18

Manufacturing jobs: 3,000

Zippo

Founded: 1932

Makes: Windproof lighters

U.S. factory: ­Bradford, Pa.

Manufacturing jobs: 350

This appears in the June 2018 issue.

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