manufacturing

Huffington Post — In one of the most uninformed — and counter-productive — op-eds we’ve read in the last five years, President Barack Obama’s first chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina D. Romer, just spent 1,200 words arguing that we should do nothing about the crisis in American manufacturing. She meticulously constructed three straw men — market failures, jobs and income distribution — and then proceeded to knock the stuffing out of each of them.

Dayton Business Journal — A proposed new law would require steel purchased by the U.S. military to be completely made in America.

On Thursday, six senators including U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, introduced legislation that would restore a decades old rule requiring that steel purchased by the U.S. military be both melted and finished in the U.S.

Putnam Sentinel — You may not know Elizabeth Williams personally, but you know someone like her.

Elizabeth Williams is a single mother of two living in North Jackson who has worked at General Motors’ Lordstown plant for 17 years. One of her sons, Zachary, dreams of becoming a state highway patrolman. Though he’s only in high school, he works as a part-time dispatcher for the Columbiana Police Department after school. Her other son, Bryan, is an iron worker who’s stayed in the Mahoning Valley and is working on building V&M Star Steel’s new $650 million expansion in Youngstown.

New York Times — On Tuesday, a coalition of big American labor unions, Democratic politicians and trade advocacy groups plans to start campaigning for the Obama administration to file a series of trade cases against China in the auto industry. They accuse Beijing of unfairly subsidizing Chinese auto parts makers and illegally restricting the exports of crucial raw materials that foreign parts makers need to stay competitive.

The group says a 900 percent increase in auto parts imports from China over the last decade, to nearly $12 billion a year, is to blame for job losses in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania — three swing states that the administration cannot easily ignore in a presidential election year.

Columbus Dispatch — Honda does not plan to ask for any government aid or incentives to help pay for the NSX plant. This is in line with Honda’s practice on previous expansions in its three decades of building cars in Ohio. The company is one of the state’s largest employers, with 13,400 workers.

“That’s good for Honda and good for all of us,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who attended the Detroit show.

WTOL – Senator Brown met Tuesday with workers at the Quality Tool and Metal Stamping plant in North Toledo following the Senate passage of a bipartisan jobs bill.

Youngstown Business Journal – Employees of the General Motors manufacturing complex here will begin validation builds next week for the diesel version of the Chevrolet Cruze. The announcement was made this morning at the assembly plant.

“We’ll do the validation builds for 14 months,” says Tom Mock, plant spokesman, “then start building for the dealerships in early 2013.”

Businessweek –  The Senate voted Tuesday to threaten China with higher tariffs on Chinese products made cheap through an artificially undervalued currency, which lawmakers blame for destroying American jobs. The House, though, is unlikely to take up the bill, which some American businesses warn could trigger a trade war.