Updated with video
Here’s an excerpt of VP Biden’s speech:
I’ve come here today with a simple message: Manufacturing is coming back. And that’s good news for America, and for America’s middle class – 430,000 new manufacturing jobs since January 2010. More than 15,000 right here in the state of Iowa. Fastest growth since the 1990s.
After years of hearing about outsourcing, a new word has come into our vocabulary: insourcing. Jobs that left the United States are coming back. Plants that closed are opening, reinvented.
…Ultimately it all comes down to the same question—the real question of this election, and the challenge of our time: Will we be a country that values the role of workers in the success of a business, and values the middle class in the success of the economy?
Or will we go backward, to the same disastrous philosophy that rewarded speculators rather than builders?
… Because to President Obama and me, rebuilding our manufacturing sector and rebuilding our country are one and the same.
…Mitt Romney has been remarkably consistent – as an individual investor, a businessman, as governor of Massachusetts, and now as a candidate for president.
Here’s a great article by Richard Florida of the Atlantic Americans Who Actually Make Things
EXCERPT: Manufacturing work is important. We should applaud the men and women who do it, and do our best to make it better, more engaging, and higher paying. The best manufacturing jobs today look more like knowledge jobs, involving high levels of analytical and social intelligence skill such as team building and developing others.
But manufacturing will not provide a viable economic future, at least not by itself.
For starters, pay for productions workers is below the national average. Their average pay is $33,700 per year, or $16.24 per hour. That compares to an average of $44,410 across all jobs, or $21.35 per hour.
For Immediate Release
March 28, 2012
Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden on Manufacturing at a Campaign Event
PCT ENGINEERING
DAVENPORT, IOWA
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/28/remarks-vice-president-joe-biden-manufacturing-campaign-event
VP Biden Remarks on manufacturing
C-Span: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/RemarksonAmer
Biden tells Quad-Cities: ‘Manufacturing is back’
Vice President Joe Biden declared today that “manufacturing is back” and launched an attack against Republican Mitt Romney in front of more than 100 people at a Davenport high-tech manufacturing plant, arguing the president is investing in bringing jobs back to the United States, while his potential rival encourages outsourcing.
The Obama campaign reached into Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts and his presidential campaign to question the Republican’s commitment to the manufacturing sector, a key jobs creator in eastern Iowa. And Biden said that while the Obama administration seeks to create jobs here, the Republicans encourage policies that ship jobs overseas.
“It’s a fundamentally different philosophy,” he said.
The Obama campaign, in a fact sheet distributed to reporters, accused Romney of contracting with offshore vendors while he was governor, vetoing legislation that barred overseas outsourcing by companies doing business with the state and overseeing a loss of manufacturing jobs in Massachusetts that was twice the national rate.
Romney was governor from 2002 to 2006.
The Obama campaign also said that his plan to eliminate taxes on foreign profits would encourage shipping jobs overseas.
The vice president’s stop in Davenport, one of two he’s making in Iowa today, is the first campaign trip by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. The ticket has made frequent official stops in Iowa, but this is the first campaign foray. Biden also will be in Sioux City today.
The campaign also sought to make the case that the economy is rebounding, particularly in the manufacturing sector, a key part of the economies of politically important Rust Belt and Midwest states, including Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“Don’t tell me that Americans can’t make anything anymore,” Biden said.
Read more: http://www.qctimes.com/news/local/biden-tells-quad-cities-manufacturing-is-back/article_874a55c6-78de-11e1-a073-001871e3ce6c.html#ixzz1qRUieSmC