Candidate Watch: North Carolina Jobs Take Flight

By Meghan Sullivan
Oct 30 2014
Photo by Mark Clifton via Flickr

The United States lost an incredible number of manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years — and North Carolina, in particular, has been hit hard. Jobs in the “first in flight” state have flown over to countries such as China, as North Carolina has lost more than 320,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001.

So why are Senate candidates Kay Hagan and Thom Tillis not talking about bringing back North Carolina’s manufacturing jobs this election? Jobs and manufacturing failed to get a mention in the candidates’ debate back in September.

Instead, there’s been plenty of finger-pointing over state budgets, Obamacare, and ISIS. While not without merit, the obsession with these issues has apparently left little room for a debate over how to create jobs and boost North Carolina’s economy. Manufacturing creates 21 percent of North Carolina’s gross state product. So why aren’t the candidates paying more attention to job creation?

We’d like to see Hagan and Tillis talk about the importance of American manufacturing and the policies that would revitalize North Carolina’s industrial sectors:

  • Robust infrastructure investment could support 27,455 jobs in North Carolina, reduce the amount of time that Americans spend in traffic every year, and increase our global competitiveness by getting our goods to market faster.
  • Buy America policies would generate additional job creation opportunities when we invest in infrastructure. As we have seen repeatedly, bypassing American workers and U.S. companies to supply the materials need to rebuild our failing infrastructure has had very mixed results, including cost overruns and questionable quality.
  • Ending currency manipulation by China and other trade cheats could create 170,000 new jobs. Our massive and growing trade deficit with China alone resulted in the loss of 2.7 million American jobs – with a whopping 11,600 of those in North Carolina.

The lack of debate over manufacturing in the North Carolina campaign is curious, especially because these issues would be a natural fit for incumbent Senator Hagan, whose voting record shows that she voted to end currency manipulation and supported Buy America policies to invest in infrastructure with American-made materials.

Tillis, on the other hand, has yet to state how he would vote on these issues. As Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Mr. Tillis claims that “helped make our state one of the best places to create new jobs in America.” He credits fiscal discipline and his efforts to balance the state’s budget. Since 2011, when Tillis was elected Speaker, North Carolina has added 177,000 jobs.

But are these good-paying jobs or have workers previously employed in manufacturing taken lower-paying or part-time work? The state still needs 89,000 manufacturing jobs to return to pre-recession levels. We’d like to know if Mr. Tillis plans to apply his cost-cutting philosophy to our nation’s infrastructure, or will he support robust, long-term investments to make America more competitive. Will he support Buy America? And, will he support deterring and penalizing currency manipulation by trade cheats like China?

With less than a week until Election Day, who is going to start talking about ending the departure of manufacturing jobs from North Carolina? Which candidate will offer a plan to bring those jobs back?

Leading up to November’s midterm elections, the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) is following how developments on the campaign trail could impact U.S. manufacturers and their workers. AAM is a nonpartisan organization and does not endorse candidates — our goal is to highlight the discussion taking place.