#82 – Inside Our Industry – Can U.S. Cash In on Reshoring Manufacturing Opportunities?
Posted on | Inside Our Industry
Reshoring continues to be a hot topic for the manufacturing sector. Bringing these jobs back to the U.S. strengthens our economy as it helps balance trade deficits and creates well-paying manufacturing jobs. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused Americans to better understand the disadvantages of relying on foreign markets for critical goods, such as PPE and semiconductor chips. The following post, in part, on FreightWaves.com, looks at the value in reshoring more manufacturing.
Can U.S. Cash In on Reshoring Manufacturing Opportunities?
Noi Mahoney, FreightWaves.com, January 6, 2022
Faced with an increasingly vulnerable global supply chain, manufacturers are building greater logistical resilience both through reshoring and nearshoring their operations, experts said.
The reshoring of manufacturing operations to the U.S. from overseas and foreign direct investment (FDI) created 160,649 manufacturing jobs during 2020, according to Harry Moser, president of the Reshoring Initiative, which tracks manufacturing jobs returning to the U.S.
“In 2020, quite a lot of jobs came back because of the need to fill the supply chain for goods such as gloves, gowns, gas masks [due mostly to the COVID pandemic],” Moser told FreightWaves. “We see the trend of more manufacturing jobs coming back continuing — reshoring of jobs could reach more than 200,000 [in 2022].”
The Reshoring Initiative is a nonprofit founded in 2010 and is a consulting firm aimed at bringing American manufacturers back to the U.S.
Reshoring involves the return of the production and manufacturing of goods to the company’s original country. It is the opposite of offshoring, which is the process of making goods overseas to try to reduce the cost of labor and manufacturing.
Reshoring of manufacturing operations back to the U.S. could inject as much as $443 billion into the economy over the next several years, according to Thomas, a sourcing, supplier selection and digital marketing company.
The findings from Thomas were part of the company’s 2021 State of North American Manufacturing Report, which said 83% of manufacturers surveyed indicated they were “likely” to “extremely likely” to reshore, up from 54% in the 2020 survey.