Right then, where were we…? Ah, yes, the 2005 NAM Labor Day Report. NAM President John Engler said we suffered from an “innovation deficiency” in this country and the number bear it out. We post three charts her for you — all contained in our Labor Day Report — which al drive home the point — a point, incidentally, which Lou Dobbs, among others, is missing.The first chart we posted as a teaser for this report a while back under a heading that termed it “the real problem.” It shows the number of engineering degrees in China, Japan, the US and Korea. Fair warning: this is a depressing slide.

The next slide shows US graduate degrees in engineering, math, physical and computer sciences in 1983 and in 2001, and shows the percentage awarded to US citizens vs. non-US citizens. No, we’re not going down a Dobbs-ian road here. We have the best colleges and universities in the world and attract the best students. We need to make sure that they are able to stay here upon graduation. Ultimately in a global economy, the work will find them. We’d rather it find them here.

The final chart shows federal outlays for research and development for life sciences and for math, computer, physical sciences and engineering. You see the former climb as the latter falls. As John Engler said, while research on new diseases is absolutely critical, so is research and monies that will help cure the innovation deficiency.

We propose three steps to begin to address these problems — three major threats — facing US Manufacturing:

1.) Improve secondary science and math teaching to foster better student performance.
2.) Reform visa and immigration policies to attract those trained in math and science.
3.) Increase federal support for basic research in engineering, math, computer and physical sciences.

You can catch this all on C-SPAN throughout the weekend. There was a ton of press interest in this and you’ll no doubt be reading about it. Or, just stop and ask any manufacturer. They’ll tell you what the problems are, they grapple with them every day.

The NAM Annual Labor Day Report was released at a press conference at 10 a.m. today featuring NAM President John Engler. There were a bunch of reporters present and C-SPAN was there, will run it through the weekend. We’ll write more on this later, but here’s the summary quote from our press release, and the crux of the report:

“As technology and competition continue to shrink our world, developing nations are accounting for an ever increasing share of global trade and economic growth. If the U.S. is to preserve its position as a major economic power in the 21st century it must stay out in front of the innovation curve, and it will need a much better-prepared workforce to do so.”

Here’s a link to our press release, and here’s a link to the full report. More to follow.

We will post the Annual Labor Day Report some time later this morning. It will be released by NAM President John Engler at a press conference at NAM HQ in Washington at 10 a.m. It will be taped and carried later on C-SPAN, so you can catch it there throughout the weekend. We guarantee it’ll have more good news than the AFL-CIO’s report, admittedly a low bar.

Every now and then we have to wallow in being right — it happens so rarely. On Monday when we posted our outlook for the week, we noted that this week the AFL-CIO would be releasing its annual Labor Day Report from Hell, the dark side of Labor Day. We said then that they will probably come out with some bad news or will tout an ever-higher number of folks who want to be represented by a union, in the face of hemorrhaging membership.

Well, we were right on both counts. As noted below, they delivered the gloom and doom just as we predicted. As for part two, yesterday we got a call from a reporter who took part in the crepe-hanging that is the AFL’s annual Labor Day press conference. She said she had been reading the blog, said that indeed the AFL said that their polling showed that a big number of workers want to join a union. We chuckled, said we were prescient. She pointed out that we had predicted 70% (in fact, we predicted 99%), but in reality it was a mere 53%, but still an all-time high for the AFL-CIO. We said what we said in Monday’s post: So go organize them. (This, by the way doesn’t include those who are represented by a union today who don’t care to be. In fairness we should subtract them out from the AFL equation, no? But we digress…)

OK, we asked, what’s the reason this year why they can’t organize? Is it us? Well, she said, they cited the Republican domination of the National Labor Relations Board (their number sank for 8 years of the Democrat-dominated Clinton NLRB); the growing social acceptance of anti-unionism (we surely never had that in this country before…); increased “passivity” from Democrats (no comment); and — are you sitting down? — THAT RONALD REAGAN FIRED THE AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS!

Good God, man — it’s been twenty-five years! They said this with a straight face! Not like their numbers were soaring before then anyway — they were in decline.

Sometimes, we find ourselves without tears. This is one of those times. Any time a group has to reach back a quarter-century to explain why they’re losing members, it enters the realm of the surreal. We have long said they have a knack for finding an endless stream of villains to blame for why they can’t organize. Fact is, they’ve not spent the money, not had the focus, the organizational commitment to get the job done. They’ve been spending their money on politics and been totally distracted by it.

And if you don’t believe us, ask Andy Stern.

Well, Labor Day is upon us. And you know what that means? The traditional end of summer, return to school and more gloom and doom from the folks over at the AFL-CIO. This has got to be the gloomiest house in town. And, it’s not just the breakup that’s made them gloomy. They’re gloomy almost every Labor Day, wringing their hands about something. In a good economy, they can always find something to be gloomy about. It’s a gift they have. Every silver lining has a cloud.

So this year’s dosage of downers comes in their annual survey of workers — this year, some 800 workers — and their attitudes on various issues. Said Andy Sullivan of Reuters, the survey of workers “found widespread dissatisfaction with their economic situation, even as other indexes show rising consumer confidence and a more plentiful job market.” Exactly. Where do they find these people every year? In some gloomy town where the sun never shines, apparently. They should hire Ben Stein to deliver this report.

“Working families are in a deep and growing economic crisis”, said John Sweeney, fresh from putting his own organization in the tank. Maybe this has colored his outlook on everything else. Maybe these are AFL-CIO employees who are being polled.

Two fun things in there, however: a huge number said they are concerned about their retirement security, but this is the same organization that doesn’t see a crisis in Social Security. And, while only 30% gave a favorable rating to President Bush, only 21% gave a favorable rating to Congressional Democrats. This must be really disheartening to a group that’s poured like a hundred million dollars down the political rathole. Somebody call, “Do over!”

In any event, here’s a link to the Executive Summary of the study, here’s a link to the press release, and here’s a link to the study itself. Happy — uh, we mean gloomy — reading!

As we’ve mentioned in this space before, in the 30′s and 40′s we ran a billboard campaign with the Outdoor Advertising Association that reached some 65,000,000 people. They ran in every town with a population greater than 2500, just getting out the manufacturing message. Thanks to the dogged determination by our own Noah Cohrssen, who traveled to the NAM Archives at the Hagley Museum in Delaware, we found another tranche of these posters and others just like them. We will be sharing them with you over the next weeks and months. They are really terrific, really timeless. They remind us of manufacturing’s roots and manufacturing’s greatness that endures today, as timeless as the message:

Good Times for Industry Mean Good Times For You

[Click on image to enlarge it]

On the eve of Labor Day 2005, organized labor has sunk to a new low. Last week, two workers were shot in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Arizona, a tragedy well chronicled on the national news, a tragedy to which Wal-Mart responded swiftly and compassionately.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union runs a site called “Wake Up Wal-Mart“, one of the many anti-Wal-Mart sites run by unions now both in and outside the AFL-CIO committed to organize Wal-Mart (as you’ll see) at any cost. The day after the shooting, they posted an item on their blog about the shootings entitled, “Tragedy at a Wal-Mart Store” that is as darkly cynical as any we have ever seen. It begins respectfully enough: “Yesterday, two young Wal-Mart workers were tragically shot dead in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Glendale, Arizona”, it says, continuing, ” We would like to express our deepest sympathy to those workers and their families.” So far, so good.

But then there’s this, on the site clearly intent on marshalling all the negative information they can about Wal-Mart, a very grim punch line: “Have any of you experienced any problems in Wal-Mart parking lots?” The AP story appears and is followed by a comment box. In other words, we are very sorry for these people who were shot — but hey, if it helps further our own ends, what the hey?

The UFCW should remove this post and condemn whoever wrote it. Decent union members across the nation should demand that it be removed. It is — even for a group desperate to reverse a decades-old decline — a new low.

Tomorrow is not only the Wednesday Poster of the Week, but also the long-awaited (at least by us) release of the Annual NAM Labor Day Report. Don’t forget to check back for both right here in this space tomorrow.

Sometimes we stumble upon really good stories from others to whom they are just old news. One of those came at the Council of Manufacturing Associations meeting earlier this month (and exhaustively chronicled here), courtesy of NEI President Skip Bowman. In the course of his remarks, he mentioned Patrick Moore. We were scribbling feverishly, spoke to Bowman about it later. Patrick Moore, it turns out, is a co-founder of (fill in adjective of choice) Greenpeace. However, after years of open conflict there, as he says, “It was time to switch from confrontation to consensus, time to stop fighting and start talking with the people in charge. I became a convert to the idea of sustainable development and the need to consider social and economic issues along with my environmental values.” He founded a group with these goals called “Greenspirit“. On his website, he says, “I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology. At the same time that business and government are embracing public participation and inclusiveness, many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. ” He could’ve asked us before he founded Greenpeace, we could’ve told him.

Joining him in a similar conversion is Stewart Brand. Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand has now stated his strong support for nuclear energy as a practical means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while meeting the world’s increasing energy demands. Wonder why that didn’t make the news….?

Finally, and a little more well-known is the Skeptical Environmentalist himself, Bjorn Lomborg. His seminal book in 2001 challenged the widely held (and widely mistaken) beliefs that the global environment is progressively getting worse. In his view — backed by exhaustive research — it’s actually getting better. And, while we’re at it, contrary to popular mainstream belief, the air is getting cleaner, as is the water, or so says the vaunted EPA.

For those of us who don’t usually intersect with the environmental universe, this all comes as somewhat of a surprise. You would think these kinds of “man bites dog” stories would be of interest, no? Seems when they go against us they’re front page news. Would’ve thought these folks might have had some coverage outside the environmental trade press, but guess not. And so we do our part. Thanks to the good folks over at the NEI who first introduced us to this, Skip Bowman and Eric McErlain. By the way, they not only have a pretty good website, but they have a pretty darned good blog. Not like we would know one if it bit us, but we think there’s is pretty good.

Who knows? Maybe this story will catch on, although don’t hold your breath for headlines that scream, “The Environment is Getting Cleaner!”, or “A Cadre of Environmentalists Exhort: “I Saw the Light!” That’s the beauty of a blog. We can write it ourselves.

In light of yesterday’s post about California Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s move to force warning labels on french fires (we wondered later, wouldn’t they slide off….?), today’s news is as refreshing as, well, a nice morning cup of coffee.

Java, joe, long reviled by various pseudo-scientists as just flat bad for you (see Google for the thousands of studies condemning the black beauty) is now revealed as the leading source of antioxidants in the US. By seizing the #1 position in this category, it bests even fruits and vegetables. (We actually always thought of coffee as a vegetable. Guess we were ahead of the curve….) Antioxidants are thought to battle cancer, among other benefits. So now we guess California will run around tearing down all the Proposition 65-led warnings at all the coffee shops ’round the state, while they focus their ire on the lowly spud, frite and chip.

For our money, we’re just going to sit back and have a few more cups of joe. Ahhh…. feel the antioxidants racing through the system!