Recently, Marlin Steel’s CEO, Drew Greenblatt, appeared on Texas Business Radio to discuss the need for more small-to-midsize manufacturers to fuel job growth and innovation in the USA.
The host for the segment, Matt Register, began with a brief introduction of Drew. His business partner, George Walden set the tone, saying: “I’m very excited to be a part of this segment. The reality is that manufacturing is returning in this country.”
Manufacturing has been making a big comeback since the end of the Great Recession, as manufacturers of all sizes have been recovering and even starting to grow in recent years. The new administration has been highly positive towards manufacturing-related issues such as scaling back regulations and taxes on small business manufacturers.
This has helped to create jobs and grow the middle class—jobs that may be at risk because of overregulation, heavy taxation, and unbalanced foreign competition.
The Way to Grow the Middle Class
After introducing a bit about the history of Marlin, Matt asked Drew about his “extracurricular activities” as the Chair of Small-to-Medium Manufacturers for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).
Drew responded by saying:
Well, I’m passionate about USA manufacturing. I think it’s critical to the success of the middle class. The way to grow the middle class is to have a prospering, thriving manufacturing economy. We pay, on average, 83,000 dollars a year in pay and benefits for our employees. That’s a staggering amount of money. And these are the kind of jobs we need as a nation. 97% of us pay health insurance. So, these are the kind of jobs that we need to coddle, and we need to grow more of. –Drew Greenblatt, Marlin Steel
By increasing the amount of manufacturing jobs in America, we can help give Americans real paying jobs with benefits that allow them to pull themselves into the upper middle class and have some financial security. —Drew Greenblatt, Marlin Steel
Strong, high-paying manufacturing jobs is how we can eliminate poverty in America.
Growing Manufacturing Jobs
The potential impact of growing manufacturing jobs in America and its effectiveness in bringing poorer American workers into the middle class led to one question: how can we grow jobs in the manufacturing sector?
Matt Register asked Drew about the Trump administration and how he’s worked with them to grow manufacturing job opportunities:
I had the privilege of meeting with President Trump on March 31st, a few weeks ago, and a couple of weeks before that, I spent an hour with Vice President Pence. We talked about their policy prescriptions on how to grow the middle class—how to get manufacturing rockin’ and rollin’ again.
I think they have a program that’ll increase jobs in America by millions and millions of jobs. They have a multi-step approach. One of them is tax reform. Right now, we’re paying—small businesses and factories are paying—39.6% in taxes. In Canada, they pay 15%. In Germany, they pay less than us. That’s not a fair situation. We can’t compete under that circumstances. President Trump is talking about driving down the tax rate so we can be more competitive. You know who the winner’s going to be? It’s going to be the unemployed person who now has a shot at a job—right now, that unemployed person has no shot.
Another thing that President Trump is pursuing is reducing regulation 75%. Right now, we have 296,000 regulations on factories in America. It’s overwhelming. And the average small factory, their employee, it’s a 34,000-dollar burden on each employee—per year—just to comply with all these regulations. Now, I think we need many regulations because we need clean air, we need clean water—that’s a given—we need worker rights protected. Those are all obvious. We don’t want air that’s as clean as China, we want American clean air.
That being said, you can still have 75% less regulations, I believe, and still meet these goals. —Drew Greenblatt, Marlin Steel
By reducing taxes and redundant regulations, manufacturers will be able to afford the increased staffing and grow their businesses in the future.
Why American Manufacturing is Back in a Big Way
Recent years have seen something of a resurgence for American manufacturing as companies are bringing some of their outsourced production back to American shores. Texas Business Radio host Matt Register asked Drew why he thought that was. Drew replied:
America’s the greatest country in the world… Our legal system might not be perfect, but you don’t have to pay off a Communist party leader to get something done in our country. We have fairly established rules and regulations and that makes it a good place to put a business.
Number 2: intellectual property rights. We protect intellectual property in America. It’s very important to our country and to our innovation. Other countries, they’ll pilfer it, they’ll steal it left and right—and that’s just not right.
These are some reasons it’s always good to be building in America: We have a huge market, we have a rich market, we have an infrastructure system that needs to be fixed, but at least it’s a solid infrastructure… we have great schools, our university system is very strong, we have great talent—people all over the world are killing themselves to go to our schools. So, there’s a lot of benefits to building in America. If we get these tax reforms done right, these regulation reforms done right, these health insurance reforms done right, you’re gonna see an American manufacturing renaissance that’ll be amazing. –Drew Greenblatt, Marlin Steel
These factors, combined with a general improvement in the American economy as a whole since the end of the Great Recession, has helped to fuel renewed growth and confidence in the manufacturing sector.