Michigan Governor: States Urged to Address Manufacturing Crisis

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has vowed to enlist her fellow governors in the fight to maintain the nation’s vital manufacturing industry. At a recent meeting of automotive industry executives and experts in Traverse City, Mich., Granholm used her keynote speech to call for actions that will stave off the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Granholm offered a three-step plan for elevating the national discourse on maintaining manufacturing jobs:

• Gather Michigan’s manufacturing industry leaders to explore issues and solutions in a state-level summit in the next several months;
• Encourage the governors of the nation’s other top manufacturing states to hold similar meetings in their states; and,
• Encourage those governors to gather in Washington, D.C. to discuss state and federal actions needed to sustain the nation’s manufacturing industry.

While the governor began her address by reviewing the good news coming out of Michigan this year, she also cited grave statistics to reinforce the immediacy of manufacturing’s problems. After a decade of steady losses, U.S. manufacturing took a precipitous nosedive with the loss of more than two million jobs in 2001-2002. Michigan lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the same two-year period.