CLEVELAND—Promoting the issues important to American manufacturing is imperative in this election cycle, according to a Huffington Post article by the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
“If there were ever a presidential contest where the issues demanded our presence at a political convention, this is the one,” wrote Scott Paul from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland July 19.
Last week, AAM posted its planned activities for Republican and Democratic National Conventions on its blog.
In Cleveland, AAM hosted its “Keep It Made in America” program in a tent just outside the Quicken Loans Arena. There, American-made goods are exhibited, and AAM officials chatted with convention goers about ways to promote and expand American manufacturing jobs, the alliance said.
At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, AAM will host a town hall meeting, “Rebuilding the Middle Class,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The meeting will feature speakers including Gene Sperling, economic adviser to Hillary Clinton, and United Steelworkers International President Leo Gerard.
“America has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years,” Paul said. “Our annual international trade in goods has gone from a nagging deficit to a gargantuan one. And a whole field of pundits are starting to reconsider one of the reliable tropes of their profession—that unfettered trade is great, without exception.
“Now, trade and the atrophy of middle-income factory jobs are dominating the national political discussion,” Paul said. “Trump talks about it constantly. But he's not alone, and this is the first time in the post-World War II era that we've seen both party candidates take the issue so seriously.”
Manufacturing was an economic pillar for decades for the American middle class, according to Paul. But a mounting pile of economic evidence shows that millions of Americans have been stuck in low-wage despair since losing their jobs to import competition.
“There's no putting any of this back in the bottle, nor should we,” Paul said. “The world's markets are out there, and we will sink or swim in them. But again, we need legitimate policy responses to these issues.”