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The founder of a new apparel company explains how he made it in America.

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Brian Williams’ Rock Center: Made in America again — jobs returning to the United States from China.

Though we’ve long been frustrated by the fact that the federal government spends taxpayer dollars on foreign-made goods, we found one recent example of this practice particularly infuriating.

During last year’s 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) purchased 70,000 commemorative bracelets for their workers. Unfortunately, these bracelets, which were intended to honor lives lost here in America, were made in China.

The 9/11 bracelets are just the tip of the iceberg.  Due to glaring loopholes in existing Buy America legislation, federal agencies have spent billions on foreign goods and services, including $500 billion in the past five years alone.

This is unacceptable. Luckily, a bill was recently introduced in Congress that is a step in the right direction: The Invest in American Jobs Act (H.R. 3533).  It will help ensure that taxpayer dollars are used to buy American-made goods for federally funded highway projects by giving preference to American-made steel, iron and other materials.  Click HERE to tell your member of Congress to support the Invest in American Jobs Act.

Tell your representative that it’s time to stop outsourcing federal purchases, and to focus on creating American jobs. Urge them to co-sponsor the Invest in American Jobs Act, a great first step toward keeping federal purchases American-made.

Together We Can Keep it Made in America.

Amid prolonged, painfully high unemployment, ABC News Anchor Diane Sawyer for the past year tirelessly advocated a simple solution – buy American-made products.  She clearly explained the reasoning: every American dollar spent on an American-made product helps create an American job.

Defying Sawyer’s admonition to search for “Made in America” tags, California set a record for using government money to create jobs in China. The Golden State awarded a contract for the new Bay Bridge that created 3,000 jobs in China for five years – a period during which the state’s unemployment rate persisted at two percentage points above the nation’s already high average.

Now there’s an antidote for California’s stupidity. It is legislation called the Invest in American Jobs Act.  Championed by U.S. Rep. Nick J. Rahall, (D-W.Va.) and Senators Sherrod Brown, (D-Ohio), Bob Casey, (D-Pa.), and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), it would strengthen existing requirements for buying American products when federal tax dollars pay for construction of highway, bridge, public transit, rail, water systems and aviation infrastructure equipment.

To create 200,000 American jobs, Sawyer has challenged Americans to spend just $64 of their $700 in holiday purchases on American-made gifts. Imagine the American jobs that would be created if “Made in America” were stamped on every single part of all $59 billion in infrastructure projects the federal government funds in a typical year.

That’s what Rahall, Brown, Casey and Stabenow want. Unless American-manufactured components aren’t available or would be outrageously more expensive, these lawmakers believe American tax dollars should buy American jobs while financing American infrastructure.  So they propose to expand the existing “Buy American” requirements and close loopholes that allow governors like California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger to circumvent the rules.

Schwarzenegger contended that California would save $400 million on the $5.1 billion Bay Bridge if it hired a Chinese firm to build steel decking and a 52-story tall support tower and ship them 6,500 miles to San Francisco.

This turned out to be a “you get what you pay for” lesson for California. The state should have been forewarned by years of publicity about problems with Chinese-manufactured products. For example, toxic drywall imported from China sickened American homeowners, corroded pipes and resulted in hundreds of millions in successful damage claims against the Chinese firms that fabricated it. Or there was the tainted blood thinner Heparin from China that killed at least 81 Americans. (more…)

One thing you can do to help bring back American jobs is look for goods made in America when you shop. People are tired of going into stores and seeing nothing but stuff from China! This holiday season your family, relatives and friends will appreciate it even more when you give an American-made gift.

Here are some resources and American-made gift ideas:

See all kinds of American-made products at USAb2C.com. From their website:

America’s largest Internet Mall for American Made Products including American Made Toys, Tools, Shirts, Clothes, Baby, Shoes, Slippers, Towels, American Made Jeans, Boots, Bikinis, Electronics, Clocks, Bird Feeders, Furniture, Books, China, Backpacks, Socks, Dolls, Hats, Apparel, Tablecloths, Blankets, Pet

Products Made In The USA – America

Over 6,000 American Made Products!!

New Balance: “New Balance is the only athletic shoe company that continues to prove high-quality athletic footwear can be produced competitively in the United States. We are committed to American workers. More than 80% of these shoes are assembled in the U.S., helping New Balance to employ over 1,200 U.S. manufacturing workers.”

Loggerhead Apparel: “Loggerhead Apparel will provide top-quality, American-grown, South Carolina-made clothing at a fair price. Ten percent of the revenue gained from the sale of all Loggerhead Apparel shirts will be donated directly to local causes supporting the conservation and protection of the Loggerhead.

In addition to supporting the Loggerhead, Loggerhead Apparel will also support the local textile industry, because no part of the production process will take place outside of the United States.”

Diamond Gusset Jeans: “Genuine. Original. Always 100% American made. Diamond Gusset Jeans. Celebrating our 25th year.” See Looking For America.

Step2 Toys: “The Step2® Company, LLC, headquartered in Streetsboro, Ohio, is the largest American manufacturer of preschool and toddler toys and the world’s largest rotational molder of plastics.” See their Creative Play Plus blog.

Okabashi Shoes: “At Okabashi we believe that technology and design can be utilized to deliver a great product to the consumer at a great value, without shifting U.S. jobs overseas. Okabashis are proudly made in the United States in Buford, GA and shipped worldwide from there.”

American-made iPhone accessories from Insanely Great: “Based in Menlo Park, California, Insanely Great Products, Inc. was created to design and build great products in America.” There’s more, here is a bit, and go read the rest:

We believe that a mistake has been made the last few decades in outsourcing too reflexively when many parts and complete products also can be made locally in the United States. It has become conventional wisdom to outsource just about every manufactured part, with the idea of U.S. manufacturing somehow viewed as practically quaint, a part of our legacy, rather than our future as a country. As happens with so many trends, we believe this one has overshot the mark, and we plan to develop an infrastructure of small, agile, distributed manufacturing units, able to rapidly meet changing demands and provide mass customization that makes at least a beginning step in starting a new trend.

Small, intelligent and agile manufacturing in America just might be what it takes to create a new source of employment to begin to reverse the outflow of manufacturing jobs.

John Briggs blogs on Made in America topics and U.S. companies at simplyamericandotnet — “Putting our Extended American Family Back to Work”

Note: I flat-out stole a lot of this info from the manufacturethis blog. I feel no shame for it.

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Johnson also is a fellow at the Commonweal Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Renewal of the California Dream.

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This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture as part of the Making It In America project.

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Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) recently attended the High Point Market in High Point, NC. Held twice a year, High Point Market is the largest home furnishings industry trade show in the world, attracting over 80,000 buyers and interior design professionals from around the globe.
This year, for the first time ever, the market included a 16,000 square foot Made in America Pavilion which showcased 30 companies that manufacture their products exclusively in the USA.

The UAW reached a tentative agreement with General Motors Co. (GM) late last night. The union says the new pact, which covers 48,500 employees, achieved some major goals, including significant investments and products for GM plants, creating good new U.S. jobs and bringing back to this country some overseas manufacturing.

UAW President Bob King said in a statement:

First and foremost, as America struggles with record levels of unemployment, we aimed to protect the jobs of our members – to guarantee good American jobs at a good American company. And we have done that. This contract will get our members who have been laid off back to work, will create new jobs in our communities and will bring work back to the United States from other countries.

(more…)

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By Len Shindel
IBEW Communications Specialist

Things were finally looking up for Dwayne Pendergraph after taking some tough licks.

Pendergraph, 32, and his wife, Darla, were back on their feet after losing their jobs in 2006 when the Carrier air cooling products plant, where they had worked for nearly 10 years, shut down and relocated from Morrison, Tenn., to Mexico — putting them and Darla’s father out of work.

Pendergraph, whose father had taken a severance package before his job at A.O. Smith in McMinville was outsourced to Mexico in 2003, went to work in a Mahle Tennex automobile parts plant in Murfreesboro feeding parts to robots for assembly.

We were like football players doing handoffs.

Darla got a job at a Rich Foods processing plant in Murfreesboro.  Although they now drove 40 miles to work in different directions, they once again had two incomes coming in.

Then the automobile industry tanked.  Pendergraph was laid off and called back.  But the robots and three production lines were sent to Mexico in 2009.

He put in an application at Philips Luminaire’s lighting fixture plant in Sparta.  “They had a good track record,” says Pendergraph, of the plant that opened in 1963 as Thomas Lighting and was designated one of the top 10 industrial plants in North America by Industry Week magazine in 2009. Hired at Philips, Pendergraph joined IBEW Local 2143 and a family of workers and managers whose long history of productive negotiations and steady improvements in productivity had assumed legendary status.

I work with a lot of good people who clock in on time every day and do a good job. When the boss comes down and needs something done, we do it.

After working at Philips for only a year, he already shared the pride in awards that the plant received for safety and efficiency. (more…)

By Steven Capozzola
Media Director, Alliance for American Manufacturing

Readers of ManufactureThis are well aware that ABC World News has been running segments this week about the importance of buying American-made products.  In addition to their reality-TV-style experiment of refurbishing a suburban Dallas home with only Made-in-USA goods, news anchor Diane Sawyer pointed out that if every American spent an extra $64 a year on buying American-made goods, it could create 200,000 new jobs in the U.S.

All this makes good sense to us.  However, Dan Ikenson at the Cato Institute views it as “dangerous, nationalistic propaganda.” Ikenson says this is “reckless” and that U.S. manufacturing “continues to thrive in every metric…except employment.”  He attributes manufacturing’s success to increased productivity– and that “making more with less is the goal! That’s how an economy grows!”

Needless to say, we profoundly disagree with Ikenson on his conclusion that all is peachy with U.S. manufacturing and the American economy.  What we really want to do is call him up and give him a piece of our mind.  We imagine a phone call that might go something like this…

ME: Hi Dan, it’s Steven Capozzola at AAM.  Listen, your viewpoint is just backward.  You guys are the ones who’ve gotten us into this mess.

IKENSON: Free trade works.  Our productivity is better than it’s ever been.  Per capita income is so much greater than it was in 1960, when we hardly imported anything.  Household goods cost less than ever.  People can buy whatever they want. (more…)