“WE ARE always short ten to 20 people,” says Jack Marshall, the manager of PPG’s plant in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The company makes coatings, paint and speciality materials for customers such as Harley Davidson, a motorcycle manufacturer based in the state, with a palette ranging from black denim to candy orange. His factory employs 550 people, many of whom must work overtime. It is hard to fill jobs, he explains, because many still think factory work involves repetitive assembly-line tasks, as in the candy factory on the old TV sitcom “I Love Lucy”.

As part of trying to shed this outdated image, America’s manufacturing industry has for the past five years celebrated the first Friday in October as National Manufacturing Day. Some 2,800 events across the country were organised this time round, ranging from factory tours to banquets. Intel, a chip giant, displayed its wafer-fabrication equipment at its enormous semiconductor manufacturing campus outside Portland, Oregon. Toyota showed visitors its robots and other advanced equipment used to make trucks at its factory in San Antonio, Texas.

The notion of a fading economic sector arises from a big drop in manufacturing employment over the past two decades (see chart). Some places were hit especially hard. From 1980 to 2005, for example, the number of factory jobs fell by some 45% in Rochester, New York, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Many people, including President Donald Trump, reckon that global trade, especially with China, is largely to blame. When Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, which employs over 1m people in China, said this summer it would build a factory in Wisconsin employing up to 13,000 people in return for $3bn in various tax breaks and subsidies from the state, Mr Trump called a press conference to celebrate.

However, studies show that the majority of past factory job losses were the result of investments in automation, which continue to pay off. American manufacturing has more than doubled output in real terms since the Reagan era, to over $2trn today. Productivity is soaring. Output per labour-hour rose by 47% between 2002 and 2015, outpacing gains in Britain, France and Germany. A survey of global chief executives conducted in 2016 by Deloitte, a consultancy, found that bosses expect American manufacturing to become more competitive than China’s as soon as the next few years, in part because pay for Chinese workers has risen. A closely followed index of American manufacturing activity hit a 13-year high in September. America’s most technologically-advanced manufacturers are now expanding confidently. Take, for example, factories in Connecticut, which long ago led the country but which have suffered badly in recent decades (from 1980 to 2005, manufacturing employment in Hartford, the state’s capital, collapsed by half). In the 1800s local manufacturers including Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin, perfected the use of interchangeable parts. Those grimy workshops made muskets and machine tools. Today the state’s manufacturers make the high-tech products of their age. General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB), a local defence contractor, won a $5.1bn contract in September to develop a new class of nuclear-powered submarines. It expects to hire between 15,000 and 20,000 workers by 2030. Pratt & Whitney (P&W), a division of United Technologies Corporation that makes jet engines, plans to hire some 8,000 workers in Connecticut (and 25,000 worldwide) over the next decade. A huge problem is that factories are struggling to find enough skilled workers. The Manufacturing Institute, an industry body, and Deloitte calculate that there will be nearly 3.5m manufacturing job openings in America in the decade to 2025, but that 2m may go unfilled. Scott Peterson, chief human-resources officer at Schwan’s, a privately owned food-manufacturing firm based in Minnesota, says he is struggling to find workers. The state is short of around 200,000 employees, he says.

Much is being done to address a national shortage of skills. A coalition of research institutes, manufacturers and federal agencies in 2014 launched the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation. This public-private partnership aims to speed up the development and adoption of such advanced techniques as 3D-printing and digital manufacturing, and to help train workers in these areas.

Policymakers, educators and companies in several states are trying to promote innovative local training schemes. JPMorgan Chase, a bank, recently announced an investment worth $40m in Chicago’s struggling South and West Sides over three years; it is also helping to revitalise Detroit. Some money in Chicago will go on a robotics-technology training programme for jobs in advanced manufacturing.

In Connecticut, too, schools as well as factories are being upgraded. Mary Moran, the principal of Eli Whitney Technical High School near New Haven, says that just five years ago its facilities looked like something out of the 1950s. Its workshops are now equipped with computerised lathes and precision-measurement machines. At Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, students earn qualifications in metalworking, factory safety and Six Sigma (a statistical method for quality control), and gain experience with local manufacturers.

It will take more than a few enterprising colleges, and local partnerships with companies, to tackle America’s yawning skills gap, but these are a start. By encouraging lots of initiatives, policymakers and manufacturers can judge what works best and copy successes elsewhere, and on a larger scale. Continued technological progress will keep manufacturing employment from returning to past heights. But if firms can find enough skilled workers to guide the machines, the sector’s output could really take off.