Emily Stover DeRocco Speech

Advanced Manufacturing Announcement
Delaware County Community College
Media, PA
October 20, 2004

Thank you, Tony. And thank you, Dr. Parker, for hosting us today and for committing Delaware County Community College to this important project.

Also with us today is Benjamin Wu, the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology. In our economy, commerce and labor are not two separate and distinct entities, but rather two dependent components of our economic engine.

While we're encouraging partnerships at the state and local levels between commerce and labor, we at the federal level must lead by example. That is why the Departments of Commerce and Labor have been working together to strengthen the Manufacturing Extension Partnership programs in locations around country.

As a matter of fact, Deputy Secretary of Labor Steven Law was in Oregon yesterday to announce another one of these partnerships. Also yesterday, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao announced advanced manufacturing awards totaling over $24 million under President George W. Bush's High Growth Job Training Initiative that will ensure that our country's manufacturing workforce is equipped with advanced skills needed for today's high-tech manufacturing jobs.

For efforts like these, Ben, I'm very pleased to be working with you and happy that you could join me here.

Today, American manufacturing finds itself in a very different world compared to 50 or 25 or even 5 years ago. We are now competing in a global economy where customers in the United States are connected in real-time to suppliers in South America, and Asia, and Eastern Europe. The time from production to market has been cut from months to days and the cost of labor in some countries is pennies per unit.

American manufacturers must operate in this reality because there is no going back. The speed of communication and travel and trade, and the interdependence of economies and institutions across international borders, make trade barriers and tariffs a false hope.

Instead the way to maintain and grow and strengthen American manufacturing is to shape and lead this world economy.

To shape the economy, President Bush is committed to opening markets around the world to American products. He has signed major agreements and is working on others to do exactly that.

While these agreements help open new markets to America's goods, we must also ensure that our current trading partners are playing by the rules.

That is why President Bush has challenged countries that are not playing by the rules on everything from intellectual property rights, to trademark infringement, to currency exchange rates. An international system where everyone plays by the rules benefits all countries.

So, while President Bush works to improve the rules governing the global economy, American manufacturers here at home are making the dramatic changes necessary to compete in that economy.

Old-line, bulky manufacturers have gone lean or cellular, creating ultra-productive and efficient operations capable of crafting products of the finest quality just-in-time for market demand.

This was a difficult and painful transition, but American manufacturing is now regaining its health.

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One of the things the President asked his Labor Department to do was support the man of sector.

So as part of his High Growth Job Training Initiative, we focused on the workforce challenges affecting the manufacturing industry.

We met with executives and human resource professionals from many areas of the manufacturing industry and something I heard at nearly every meeting was that they were desperate for skilled workers.

The orders were coming in faster than they could fill them and if they could find the workers, they had enough business to run three full shifts 6 days a week.

The reason why they struggled to find workers was that the transformation in the industry was not just from bulky to lean, but from traditional to advanced. No longer were good hands and a strong back enough to be successful in manufacturing.

Today workers need skills in math and engineering and computer programming while understanding supply-chain management and the integration of automated systems. Almost overnight, manufacturing went from a low-skill occupation to a high skill occupation.

So, how can we solve this skill shortage and help American manufacturers reach their potential? It must be through partnerships that include employers, educators, and the public workforce system. And I am here today to recognize just such a partnership.

The Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center has brought together a partnership that includes employers from all over the Philadelphia area, the Delaware County and Montgomery County Community Colleges, and the local Pennsylvania CareerLink offices. This partnership will help identify and train hundreds of students in advanced manufacturing skills and place them in jobs with area employers.

The reason why these and other partnerships like them are so important is that if the United States is going to continue to lead the world economy, it must do so through innovation.

Innovation is not something you plan or schedule though. It happens when you gather the best educated, most highly trained and productive workforce in the world and give them the freedom to think and adapt and be creative. That is why, for all the concern that some emerging countries are destined to eclipse us, the United States will continue to lead the world economy for the foreseeable future.

It gives me great hope to see the Delaware Valley Industrial Resource Center attract so many partners to this project. I am thrilled to make them a part of the High Growth Job Training Initiative and on behalf of President Bush, I am proud to present Chairwoman Bernadine Hawes with a check for $3,000,000 to continue training the workers of the Delaware Valley in Advanced Manufacturing.