You’ll recall that during the Presidential campaign, it seemed you couldn’t go a minute without some news outlet screaming about the ills of “outsourcing”. Indeed, this was an issue that the Kerry campaign embraced. Sen. Kerry promised to get tough on all outsourcers, by God, in a way that he couldn’t quite define and in a way that apparently had eluded him for the past two decades in the Senate as a proponent of free trade.

No matter, we were wondering what happened to the issue, now that the campaign had passed, so we did a little search and found out that for the month before the election, the Washington Post used the term “outsourcing” some 33 times. In the month after the election, its usage dropped in half, to 16. This presumably includes the mentions in the election wrap-ups which used the word only to note that it wasn’t much of an issue. In Business Week, one of the most anti-business publications in the US, the month before the election saw 41 mentions of the word and the month since has seen it also drop in half, to 20.

We’ll check it again in a month or so, but we think we know what we will find. With the election behind us, it’ll continue to be a melting snowman of an issue. Hopefully we can focus on the real issue, that of trimming the 22% (non-wage) cost disadvantage we face with our trading partners.

By now you’ve already figured out that Social Security will be a pretty big issue here in the coming year, or years. To get you started, here’s a “To The Point”, one of our famous NAM one-pagers on the topic. Read it well, there will be a quiz.

You should also know that we house the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (AWRS). Here’s another one pager on who they are and what they stand for, and a list of their principles, adopted in 1999 and endorsed by the President’s Commission. As Derrick Max, Executive Director of the AWRS reminds me in a phrase apropos of the Social Security debate, just because they’re a little old doesn’t mean they’re not still good.

This week marked our quarterly Nat’l Public Affairs Steering Committee meeting, here in DC. Some interesting stuff always comes out of these meetings. This year we were enlightened by Rich Galen of “Mullings” fame, and an all-around entertaining guy. We heard from Darrell Shull of BIPAC and Whit Ayres of Ayres, McHenry & Associates, both entertaining as well, and insightful. All provided their political insight, looking both back and forward.

Rich used no slides, only his wits, which are on view regularly though his cyber-column, “Mullings“. If you don’t subscribe, you should. In one of our first blog entries, we noted his coining of the verb “to daschle”, or more accurately, “to be daschled”.

Darrell Shull presented some very interesting data from BIPAC and the net effect of the Prosperity Project (P2), in which so many NAM members participated. His slides have some good data on the usage of the BIPAC website, including tracking page views per day and per state and some voter registration and early voter numbers as well. In Ohio alone, some 119,000 voter registration forms were downloaded through the P2 website. The President’s margin of victory in Ohio? 118,000 votes.

Whit Ayres did a great analysis of some of the numbers from the 2004 election, with some good comparisons on turnout and demographics with the election of 2000. (Anyone remember the election of 2000….?). There are some great slides here, including one on the voting patterns of churchgoers (vs. non-churchgoers), the changing political dynamics in the South and on the expected impact of all of this on our agenda in the 109th Congress.

All these slides are available on our Public Affairs website. Happy reading!

This one deserves its own entry, separate and apart from the one above.

Darrell Shull of BIPAC also had some slides from a post-election survey that they did, asking employees whether they received information from their employers during the election, whether or not they found it helpful, whether they wanted to hear from their employer on this kind of stuff, etc., etc.

Interestingly, when asked, “Which organization do you feel provides the most credible political information on issues and elections affecting your job, company and industry?”, by a whopping 59% – 8%, respondents chose, “My employer” over “Labor unions”.

Once again, this just goes to show the potency of the P2 efforts with employees, even those who are represented by unions. It irks the folks at the AFL-CIO to hear that they’re out of touch with their members, but numbers like this just bring it home.

Check out these slides here.

Don’t know how many of you caught the article in yesterday’s Washington Post about the new results from the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests. This is an annual test of students in all OECD countries, and the results are never great for the US. This year was no exception: we ranked a dismal 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy alone. NAM President John Engler, a zealot on education reform, said, “When America’s 15 year-olds demonstrate less math literacy than those in Hungary and the Slovak Republic, US policymakers, educators and employers ought to be shocked into action.” As Bill Brock used to say, “We rank last in everything but self-esteem.”

You can talk about manufacturing all day, and the challenges we face, but all roads lead to education and to the schools. We must make every effort to ensure that our schools are delivering a product we can use. Many years ago, David Kerns, then CEO of Xerox, complained that he was, “sick and tired of doing the recall work for the Nation’s schools.” It’s time to start applying the principles of manufacturing — metrics, zero defects, accountability — to the American educational system. How many more wake up calls do we need?

Whaddaya say, NEA, are you with us….?

Keeping our reputation as the only blog that is actually working to get you more business (if you’re a manufacturer), the NAM is hosting its first in what we expect to be a series of webinars – seminars on the web – to help you export into booming markets. The first one will be on December 14 from 7:00- 8:15 p.m. (due to the time difference)and will focus on China, specifically:

– How to research the market to assess sales opportunities;

– How to find an agent, distributor or business partner in China; and

– How to use the services that the US Department of Commerce and the US Commercial Service in China offer to small and medium-sized companies.

For more info follow this link.

As mentioned below, our new boss, former Michigan Governor John Engler, went to Florida last week for a first-of-its kind manufacturing summit. Well, he’s not the kind of guy to sneak in and out of town unnoticed and indeed he didn’t disappoint this time, either. Stories appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat, Tampa Tribune, AP, Metro Networks (Radio), Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Daytona Beach News-Journal and South Florida Business Journal about his trip and the efforts of manufacturers and Governor Jeb Bush to make manufacturing a priority in what is a significant manufacturing state.

Here’s a link to our press release summarizing the event and its outcome, and including some good video clips of Gov. Bush and of our extraordinary Board Member Al Stimac of Metal Essence.

For those of you who didn’t see it, there’s a good piece in yesterday’s Washington Post Outlook section by former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal, opining on why he thinks Kerry lost Ohio. Using some recent data collected post-election by Rosenthal and his troops, he challenges some conventional wisdom. His bottom line is that the reason for Bush’s victory was not “a flood of ‘moral values’ voters”, but rather, “skillful exploitation of public concern over terrorism by the Bush team – coupled with Democrats’ inability to draw clear, powerful contrasts on the economy and health care…” All in all, an interesting piece. Who knows? In desperation, maybe the AFL-CIO will go back to organizing.

Been a little quiet around the blog these days, while we were out attending the Council of Manufacturing Associations Winter Leadership Conference in Baltimore last week. The Council is a group of about 300 manufacturing associations, and their conferences are usually jam-packed with interesting information on association management as well as insights from some visionaries as well. The latter are typically courtesy of Leading Authorities, a perennial sponsor of these meetings, with a stable of first-rate speakers. This year they did not disappoint, featuring Oren Harari, author of the best-selling, “Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell” on competitive advantage. Among other observations, he noted that as late as 1980, the three networks – NBC, CBS and ABC – had 90% of the market. This before the world descended into blogs, of course. In any event, he was entertaining and insightful. All the slides from the conference – including some very interesting presentations around various topics of association management – will be available on the Council website tomorrow.

OK, we’ll file this under “comic relief”. Got an e-mail from our old buddy Dick Kelch, King of Ashton Plastic Products in Xenia, Ohio. We’ve talked about Dick before as you may recall. He’s the guy who — like so many manufacturers — has fiercely battled back against the competition and has innovated and come up with some great new products. Here’s the Handle Helper that’ll make it easier to shovel snow for people older than Dick, and a picture
of Dick, just waiting for the snow.

Typical manfuacturer, can’t wait to test out the new product…..