Secretary Solis: "Let's Bring Our Jobs Home"

A new op ed from the Secretary of Labor:

Most Michiganders are familiar with one of the major challenges of our global economy: preserving good manufacturing jobs here at home at a time when some companies are tempted to outsource production abroad.

Today, however, I visited a manufacturing plant operated by an American company that is helping to pioneer a new trend of bringing good jobs back home. We call this “in-sourcing.”

Falcon Waterfree Technologies is a clean energy company with a global footprint. But effective this month, it will begin making product components previously made in Shanghai in Grand Rapids as Michigan becomes the company’s manufacturing hub for the entire Western Hemisphere.

If Congress embraces President Obama’s plan, we will see a lot more of this in-sourcing in America’s future.

As the nation’s Secretary of Labor, I work in an administration whose policies have helped add back more than a half-million U.S. manufacturing jobs since January 2010. This represents the sector’s strongest job growth in 17 years. President Obama and I believe we can accelerate this growth by reforming our tax code.

When I travel around the Midwest and tell workers about how our current federal tax policies actually reward companies that ship our jobs away, the reaction I hear most often is disbelief.

When I tell workers that President Obama has been trying to fix this inequity but can’t find bipartisan support in Congress to do so, that disbelief quickly turns to anger.

But it’s true. And now is the time to fix it.