Earlier this week, our publisher Mr. Fox, suggested Fox & Hounds include in this week’s lineup the piece below by Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, “Doing business in California may be a challenge, but some choose to stay”. I agree, and will add a few words why.
Throughout the past 30 years in California, there have been conferences, discussions, opinion articles, even books on the death of manufacturing in our state. In the 1980s a main workforce theme was the “deindustrialization” of California, as our heavy manufacturing base, particularly our auto manufacturing base, began to shrink. In the 1990s, heavy manufacturing loss was followed by closures of a number of our major aerospace and defense plants.
In October 1989, we had over 2.1 million payroll manufacturing jobs in California, and still had over 2 million payroll manufacturing jobs through the early 1990s. Since that time our manufacturing payroll jobs have declined, so that we now stand at 1,243,900 manufacturing jobs in August 2012, the latest job report. This August 2012 manufacturing jobs number is larger than the total number of jobs in many states. But with manufacturing, as other sectors, technology and globalization are rapidly bringing new competition.
This piece by Mr. Kasler gets out to manufacturing firms in California to examine those like the Campbell Soup plant that are not able to survive, as well as those like Jackson Laboratory that are growing. It is a valuable addition to our ongoing discussion. Please click here for the piece.