Manufacturing

A Santa Ana Community Land Trust Energizes Innovation

April 22, 2025 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! California, community land trusts, Manufacturing, small-scale manufacturing

It was a cool Saturday morning in Santa Ana, California, earlier this year. At the corner of Walnut and Daisy, an urban farm displayed rows of beautiful carrots and greens. Shipping containers – turned into coffee-shop business space – were painted in blues, oranges, and greens. Community artists speaking English and Spanish gathered at the center of the area to add the finishing touches to an artisan production shed. Ana Urzua, executive director of Cooperacion Santa Ana, looked out at the nearly completed construction. Ten years ago, this had only been a dream. In 2015, when the city announced plans to widen two large streets of Santa Ana and began purchasing neighboring homes and storefronts to demolish, Urzua was part of a community coalition that knew they would need to organize against it innovatively.

The Black Swan: Why The Age Of Tariffs Is Sunsetting

April 14, 2025 Jeremy Rifkin, Popular Resistance. Create! 3D Printing, Manufacturing, Tariffs, Trade

Unlike physical goods produced by global companies and subject to tariffs in world trade, global companies and high tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) utilizing AI directed 3D printing/additive manufacturing can share digital software files for their product lines with local distributors at near zero marginal cost around the world. Distributors can then print out the items and deliver them to consumers without paying tariffs. And that changes everything. On April 2nd, the White House announced that the administration will issue a reciprocal tariff “number” to various nations that the US argues “represents their tariffs” obligation, in what’s shaping up as the great geopolitical tariff war of the 21st century.

Turning A Neglected State Roadway Into An Economic Engine

April 12, 2025 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! Local Economy, Manufacturing, Missouri, Small Businesses, Urban Design

Business Loop 70 looks like many American roads as it cuts through Columbia, Missouri. Four lanes of traffic; some sections with sidewalks, others without; a car dealership with a sea of available cars; an old single-floor mall set behind rows of parking, and an old brick smoke stack from a long-forgotten power plant. Yet that one-and-a-half-mile stretch of state highway contains a model of innovation for the nation. Every day, Carrie Gartner parks in front of a small storefront and steps into the offices of the Loop Community Improvement District, where for the past decade she’s been working to achieve the seemingly impossible: turning a random collection of properties along a state highway into a destination for families and entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneur’s Eviction Leads To Community Model For The World

March 5, 2025 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! Atlanta, Displacement, entrepreneurship, Gentrification, Manufacturing, Mutual Aid

Kiyomi Rollins can smell the coffee even before she walks through the door at The Ke’nekt Cooperative in Atlanta’s Westview neighborhood. Sunshine fills the space with energy; every seat is full. She smiles at the neighborhood aunties sitting next to the entrepreneurs from Atlanta University Center and the community resident teaching a small group about social media content creation for neighborhood startups. She watches as a middle-schooler from down the street fundraises for his school trip and each person around the table helps out however they can.

Removing Obstacles For Small-Scale Manufacturers In Boston

February 13, 2025 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! Boston, Manufacturing, Massachusetts, Small Businesses

Jen Faigel stood in the production line watching a rush of mini-pies bake to a golden brown. Around her, 10 people stood at different spots, each responsible for a different process: pouring in the apple and blueberry filling, sprinkling a generous helping of crumb topping, sliding the pies in to bake, pulling pies off the cooling rack and into custom-designed packaging. After seven days of baking, it smelled like her grandma’s kitchen. Teresa Maynard, owner of Sweet Teez Bakery, and her team were busy filling the largest single order they had ever received: 42,000 pies, going to 25 Whole Foods stores.

Baltimore Is Setting A National Standard For Diversifying Its Economy

November 8, 2024 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! Baltimore, Local Economy, Manufacturing, Maryland, Worker Rights and Jobs

One of the crucial economic lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic is the importance of diversifying local economies, even in America’s largest cities. New York City continues to struggle with an economy too heavily reliant on tourists and commuters; Las Vegas saw its entertainment industry shut down when out-of-state visitors stopped traveling; vacant storefronts are prominently visible in major business districts and on main streets nationwide. Diversifying often implies attracting new industries by luring them from elsewhere – often a zero-sum game, if the industries are simply shifting locations within the United States.

Vacant Storefronts Are Killing Our Downtowns

April 15, 2024 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, Manufacturing, Retail

One of the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is the way it has transformed office use, threatening the viability of storefront retail in downtown office buildings. Owners of such commercial properties are now often exploring converting vacant retail space into restaurants and other experiential venues. But the range of alternative options needs to be expanded – and small-scale manufacturing offers a proven, yet often overlooked, solution. The need for alternative options is apparent from the scale of the problem. In the last quarter of 2023, the national office vacancy rate hit a record-breaking 19.6%, per Moody’s Analytics.

Organizing Rural Manufacturing Workers Matters

November 10, 2020 Cindy Estrada and Chris Schwartz, The Forge. Organize! Labor Unions, Manufacturing, The South, Worker Rights and Jobs

It’s no secret that the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has steadily declined over the past few decades, replaced largely by low-wage work in the service sector. But in many rural communities, manufacturing is still the most important part of the local economy. In fact, manufacturing jobs account for 21 percent of all earnings for rural communities, more than triple the income from farming work. Manufacturing represents a particularly important source of employment for workers of color in many rural communities.

No Manufacturing Renaissance, US Manufacturing Is In Trouble

February 26, 2020 Marty Hart Landsberg, Economicfront.wordpress.com Educate! Inter-Imperialist Rivalry, Manufacturing, Trump Administration

President Trump is all in, touting his success in rebuilding US manufacturing. For example, in his state of the union address he claimed: We are restoring our nation’s manufacturing might, even though predictions were that this could never be done. After losing 60,000 factories under the previous two administrations, America has now gained 12,000 new factories under my administration.

Chris Hedges Visits Indiana City To See Impact Of Job Flight

August 24, 2017 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Educate! Cars, Manufacturing, Workers, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - In a special edition of "On Contact," Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges visits Anderson, Ind., formerly a center of car production. He witnesses the economic and psychological impact on workers caused by the flight of General Motors jobs overseas. The city has changed dramatically since the 1970s when, at the peak of American automobile manufacturing, a third of Anderson's 70,000 residents worked at General Motors. Over the past 30 years, Anderson's population has decreased as thousands upon thousands of well-paid union jobs have been lost. Watch the video above in which Hedges interviews people in what used to be "big car country" and documents what's become of Anderson now.

Mississippi Autoworkers Mobilize

July 18, 2017 Michelle Chen, www.dissentmagazine.org Resist! Cars, Manufacturing, Mississippi, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Michelle Chen for Dissent - The workers at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, had high hopes when the state-of-the-art factory complex moved in fourteen years ago to a small, majority black town where more than a quarter of residents live in poverty and decent jobs are scarce. As the manufacturing economy stagnated in the early 2000s, Nissan brought a streak of Clinton-era economic optimism into this struggling corner of the South. The global auto giant erected a multinational enterprise that is now the largest local employer, with more than 5,000 blue-collar jobs for an area with a workforce of fewer than 8,000. The factory’s launch was intended to make Canton a keystone of Mississippi’s “advanced manufacturing” growth agenda, promising decades of job development. But paint technician Morris Mock sees his hopes evaporate every day on the line. After fourteen years at the plant, he says, “People are hurting inside of my factory.” His fellow coworkers have been concerned by what they see as increasingly unstable working conditions and general deterioration in benefits and safety protections. A few years ago they campaigned to organize with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Since then, he says, the workers have faced growing hostility from management for seeking to unionize...

Public Cost Of Low-Wage Production Jobs In Manufacturing

May 18, 2016 Ken Jacobs et al, www.laborcenter.berkeley.edu Educate! Manufacturing, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Ken Jacobs, Zohar Perla, Ian Perry and Dave Graham-Squire for UC Berkely Labor Center - Much attention has been given in recent years to low-wage work in the fast-food industry, big-box retail, and other service sector industries in the U.S. The rise of low-wage business models in the service sector has often been contrasted to business models of the past, when blue collar jobs in the manufacturing industry supported a large middle class in the United States. Recent research by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), however, found that manufacturing production wages now rank in the bottom half of all jobs in the United States.

More Than Third Of Counties Median Income Dropped 10% Since 2000

January 26, 2016 Tim Henderson, www.pewtrusts.org Educate! Income, Manufacturing, United States

By Tim Henderson for The PEW Charitable Trust - ROCKDALE COUNTY — This Georgia suburb, about 23 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, has been buffeted by the broader economic troubles the U.S. has experienced since 2000. Rockdale County businesses produce disposable cups and pizza boxes, walk-in coolers and pre-fabricated gas stations. But since the turn of the century, the number of manufacturing jobs in the county has declined by 27 percent, according to the latest County Business Patterns report produced by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (2/3)

June 20, 2014 The Real News, www.therealnews.com Educate! Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Interview, Labor, Manufacturing, Mass Movement, Noam Chomsky

The idea still should be that of the Knights of Labor: those who work in the mills should own them. And there's plenty of manufacturing going on in the country, and probably there will be more, for unpleasant reasons. One thing that's happening right now which is quite interesting is that energy prices are going down in the United States because of the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, which is going to destroy our grandchildren, but under the, you know, capitalist morality, the calculus is that profits tomorrow outweigh the existence of your grandchildren. It's institutionally-based, so, yes, we're getting lower energy prices. And if you look at the business press, they're, you know, very enthusiastic about the fact that we can undercut manufacturing in Europe because we'll have lower energy prices, and therefore manufacturing will come back here, and we can even undermine European efforts at developing sustainable energy because we'll have this advantage. Britain is saying the same thing. I was just in England recently. As I left the airport, I read The Daily Telegraph, you know, I mean, newspaper. Big headline: England is going to begin fracking all of the country, even fracking under people's homes without their permission. And that'll allow us to destroy the environment even more quickly and will bring manufacturing back here.

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