I went back to Ohio in April to look at a plant that opened in 2023 with a great deal of ceremony. It makes a part that used to be made in Monterrey. The governor came. There were remarks about bringing it home.
There are four people on the floor per shift. One of them is a maintenance technician and one is there because the insurer requires a human present. The cell that does the actual work cost more than the building it sits in.
The plant it replaced in this county, which closed in 2007, ran about nine hundred.
I keep hearing reshoring discussed as if it were one thing. It is two, and they are close to opposite, and almost everybody arguing about it in public has an interest in not separating them.
The first thing is output. Do we make the part on this continent or on another one. That is a real question with real answers, and the case for making it here — a pandemic, a canal, a war, a single supplier in one industrial park who can stop your line for eleven months — got much stronger in the last five years and I find it persuasive. It is a question about vulnerability.
The second thing is jobs. Do a lot of people in this county earn a living making it. That question was settled some time ago and not by trade policy. It was settled by the machines, which got good enough that the labour content of the part fell by something like ninety-five percent, and would have fallen whether the work sat in Ohio or in Monterrey. Bringing the part back does not bring the hours back, because the hours no longer exist anywhere. Monterrey lost them too.
Everyone technical knows this. It is not controversial in the building. What happens is that the two arguments get welded together for the announcement, because the vulnerability argument does not fill a podium and the jobs argument does, and then the county is left holding an expectation nobody in the industry ever shared.
The objection is fair enough: four jobs are better than zero jobs, the tax base is real, the suppliers around it are real, and the technician's wage is genuinely good. I do not dispute any of that. I would take the plant. I am objecting to the sentence spoken at the ribbon, not to the ribbon.
Because here is what the sentence costs. A county that believes the factory jobs are coming back makes decisions on that basis for a decade — what it funds, who it trains, what it tells its seventeen-year-olds. The four jobs at that plant require a two-year technical qualification and there are eleven of them within an hour's drive. That is a real thing to build a training programme around, and it is not what anybody built, because the announcement said something else.
The maintenance tech I talked to did his associate degree at the community college eight miles away. He said the program had six people in his cohort and eighteen open seats. Then he asked me not to put the name of the plant in anything, because the last person who wrote about the headcount got someone in trouble.
