Workforce Reshoring: Turning Performance

ot that we needed to be reminded, but last month’s news of the tariffs the U.S. announced on imports from all countries makes it painfully obvious that manufacturing in this country remains sorely misunderstood by the general public. And, that goes for much of the news media as well.

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement April 2, most news media outlets framed the tariffs as a political or economic tactic related to inflation or geopolitical motives. While true enough, generally speaking, such coverage gives short shrift to a complex story. A few business-oriented outlets, like Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, thankfully made the effort to delve into the stated goal of the tariffs — to spark a renaissance in U.S. manufacturing. Or, in less poetic terms, the goal is to encourage more manufacturers to locate jobs and facilities in this country, something widely known today as manufacturing reshoring.

The tariff news coverage not only underscores the need to update the public’s perception of manufacturing, it pretty much establishes that need as a prerequisite for the success of workforce development and manufacturing reshoring efforts. To explore why, I turned to three industry leaders uniquely qualified and actively leading the charge for the changes needed to improve workforce development and manufacturing reshoring efforts in this country.

Harry Moser

Harry Moser, a 58- year industry veteran and founder of the Reshoring Initiative, grew up during an era when the U.S. still reigned as the world’s industrial leader and his father and grandfather both worked at the Singer Sewing Machine Manufacturing Co. in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Moser himself spent summer vacations from school working at the plant, which is historically regarded as a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution. By the time the plant closed in 1982, Moser was well on his way to forging his own manufacturing career. In 1985, he went to work for Charmilles Technologies, an EDM machine tool company in Lincolnshire, Illinois, where he served as president for nearly 25 years. By the time he retired from the company — now known as GF Machining Solutions — in 2007, Moser had grown tired of watching a long list of American manufacturing plants move offshore. So, in 2010, he founded the Reshoring Initiative to help bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. by providing free analytical tools, such as its Total Cost of Ownership Estimator. The tool helps American companies understand all the financial ramifications associated with offshoring, such as inventory carrying costs, travel costs to check on suppliers, opportunity costs from product pipelines being too long, and risks to intellectual property.

Terry Iverson

Terry Iverson, a 45-year machine tool veteran, is the former owner and president of Iverson & Company, a machine tool sales, service and remanufacturing company in Des Plaines, Illinois, founded by his grandfather in 1931. Since selling the business in June 2023, Iverson has turned his focus to giving back to the industry that has been part of his family for three generations. Iverson, who first began speaking to high school students about manufacturing in the mid 1990s at Moser’s encouragement, founded CHAMPION Now! in 2012 as a nonprofit organization focused on changing the public’s outdated view of manufacturing careers. He’s written two books supporting that mission: Finding America’s Greatest Champion, published in 2018, and Inspiring Champions in Advanced Manufacturing, published in 2023. In addition, Iverson developed and launched Camp CHAMP, a traveling workshop that features two table-top CNC machines — a mill and a lathe — and a curriculum designed to introduce middle school students to careers in manufacturing. Having received positive feedback from a dozen camps held throughout the Chicago metropolitan area in the past year, Iverson hopes to expand Camp CHAMP workshops nationwide.

Roy Sweatman

Roy Sweatman, a 60-year industry veteran, is the president and owner of Southern Manufacturing Technologies Inc. (SMT), an AS9100- and ISO9001-registered precision machine shop in Tampa, Florida, that specializes in complex precision machined components and assemblies for the aircraft, aerospace, defense and medical industries. Sweatman began his career as an apprentice machinist at General Electric in Erie, Pennsylvania. He spent 13 years with GE, working his way up to general manager of GE’s Cleveland, Ohio, facility. He left GE and spent the next five years as general manager for a Cleveland- area precision machine shop. Then, in 1983, he moved to Tampa, Florida, to purchase a small machining company with five employees. That company was SMT, which now employs more than 100 people. Sweatman’s industry involvement, however, goes even deeper than that. In addition to being a CHAMPION Now! board member, Sweatman serves or has served on the boards for a lengthy list of manufacturing trade associations, including the National Tooling and Machining Association (NTMA), the National Institute for Metalcutting Skills (NIMS), the Bay Area Manufacturers Association (BAMA), and Florida’s State Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) known as FloridaMakes. He’s also active with numerous advisory councils for a variety of educational institutions in the Tampa area.

Opportunity knocking

The debate surrounding the government’s tariff strategy has thrust the U.S. manufacturing industry onto the world stage, front and center. As an industry, we must seize this rare opportunity to introduce this nation to an industry that is clean, safe and brimming with well-paying career opportunities to program and operate the most innovative, technologically advanced machines and processes available today. Plus, we must make abundantly clear the strength of U.S. manufacturing and its place in today’s economy.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Value Added by Industry: Manufacturing as a Percentage of GDP [VAPGDPMA], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/VAPGDPMA, April 2, 2025.

Take a minute to consider how prolonged access to this media spotlight is an opportunity for the industry to shatter the public’s negative views of manufacturing. Given that the tariffs are intended to spark a manufacturing renaissance, there’s a real possibility the public’s focus on the industry will linger — despite the 90-day tariff pause announced a week later.

Notably ignored by much of the ensuing tariff analysis was any mention of the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the vulnerability of extended global supply chains, especially those heavily reliant on single-source suppliers — many of which are in China or Southeast Asia. Plus, labor shortages compounded supply chain bottlenecks during the pandemic due to worker absenteeism, illness and burnout.

While automation, upskilling and workforce retention are now priorities throughout the industry, the skilled labor shortage remains a major hurdle. And, there’s no quick fix for a problem decades in the making.

The once-thriving American middle class, long anchored by a strong manufacturing base, bore the economic brunt of offshoring. Little wonder why the public may still hold a dim view of manufacturing career prospects. Exasperating the labor shortage, meanwhile, has been a 50-plus year crusade in this country pushing everyone to seek higher education.

For a successful renaissance, Moser observed, manufacturing output would have to increase by 30% or more, and that’s not possible unless the federal government and the industry work together to first resolve the skilled labor shortage.

No longer the global leader

The public’s perception that manufacturing is an industry in decline became more entrenched in 2010, which is when China overtook the U.S. as the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. Until that point, the U.S. had reigned as the global manufacturing leader for decades while China struggled with wars, unrest, weak government, natural disasters and poor economic policies. China began turning things around when it implemented economic reforms in the late 1970s, and over the next 30 years transformed into the world’s largest manufacturing hub, according to a 2007 research paper by Angus Maddison titled, “The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, 1960-2030.”

As of 2023, China’s share of global manufacturing reached 31.8% — more than double the 15% global share produced by the U.S., according to the 2024 edition of the International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics published by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. For some perspective on China’s rapid industrial rise, its share of global manufacturing output stood at just 3% in 1990.

Yet, U.S. manufacturing remains strong. As of 2024, the U.S. manufacturing sector added $2.94 trillion to the economy, accounting for 10% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Again, for perspective, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has compared the U.S. manufacturing output alone against the total GDP of other countries to see where it would rank. This year, U.S. manufacturing would be ranked as the eighth largest economy in the world.

After China and the U.S., the top 10 list of countries with the largest share of global manufacturing output in 2023 includes Japan with 6.6%, Germany with 4.6%, India with 3.2%, the Republic of Korea with 3.0%, the United Kingdom with 1.9%, Italy with 1.8%, Mexico with 1.8% and France with 1.7%.

The accompanying chart, “Trade Deficit Drove Jobs Down” on page 17, shows China experiencing much of its growth over U.S. manufacturing between the years 2000 and 2010. Following the aught years, Moser said, there’s some gradual improvement for U.S. manufacturing, “albeit we’re losing jobs less rapidly.”

Moser added, however, that U.S. manufacturing managed to stanch the flow of jobs to China during the aught years. Since 2010, Moser has tracked all job announcements tied to reshoring and foreign companies investing in some way in manufacturing jobs on U.S. soil, otherwise known as foreign direct investment (FDI).

In fact, U.S. manufacturing jobs from reshoring and FDI reveals overall consistent growth since 2010. (See chart, “Reshoring + FDI Jobs Announced per Year” on page 22.)

“The rate of job announcements has risen from 11,000 in 2010 to 240,000 in 2024, much better than anyone anticipated in 2010 when we were founded,” Moser observed.

Though the companies that have reshored or gone the FDI route have been able to find the workforce they need, he continued, other companies choose not to reshore directly because of the skilled labor shortage, further emphasizing the importance of workforce development efforts to alleviate the problem.

What’s more, a recent Reshoring Initiative survey of about 500 U.S. manufacturers found that “a sufficient quantity and quality of workforce” within the U.S. would bring back more manufacturing than any of the other surveyed options, Moser reported. A sufficient workforce was the clear favorite among the other options presented in the survey, which included tariffs, a lower value for the U.S. dollar, lower tax rates and fewer regulations.

The group as a whole said that a 15% additional tariff applied to everything from everywhere would help increase their output by 24%, Moser continued. By contrast, the same group said an abundant U.S. workforce with higher skills would on average increase their output by 30%.