Word: valleyful
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Take a tour of the valley--the very one Bethlehem Steel once symbolized--and you'll find that American manufacturing hasn't disappeared; it is reinventing itself. As Bessie and many of its fellow titans have marched slowly into bankruptcy, a new breed of manufacturing company has quietly emerged in the Lehigh Valley and in cities across the U.S., even amid one of the worst manufacturing purges in recent memory. More than 2 million of the 2.5 million jobs lost over the past two years were in the manufacturing sector, and many are gone forever. But the U.S. economy...
John Jones, CEO of Air Products & Chemicals, remembers what it was like to be a young engineering graduate in the 1970s, when Bethlehem Steel was king of the valley. "When I was getting out of school, that was one of the places to go," he says. "When people asked me where I was working, and I'd say Air Products," he says, the usual response was pity. "They would go, 'Awww.'" Today Air Products, with 4,300 workers, has replaced Bessie as the valley's largest industrial employer...
...help companies stay competitive. Rather than allowing themselves to be done in by the relatively high cost of labor in the U.S. as compared with Asia, some manufacturers are finding ways to maximize the worth of that skilled labor. B. Braun Medical, a medical-equipment maker in the valley, is a good example. The $750 million company makes intravenous tubing, anesthesia kits and other devices. On a tour of the company's production facilities in Allentown, CEO Caroll Neubauer proudly displays a large metal chamber where cardboard boxes packed with finished goods are sterilized. "This used to be outsourced," Neubauer...
Ultimately, even the most ambitious overhaul will not be enough to keep some types of manufacturing in the U.S. When the semiconductor industry moved to a different type of fabrication standard, Agere Systems found itself with 6,000 employees in the Lehigh Valley and an obsolete plant. Over the past three years, the $2 billion company has shifted its manufacturing to Florida and Singapore and reduced its head count in the valley to 2,500. Although Agere has made a commitment to keep its design and testing operations in the area, recently bringing 600 of those jobs to Allentown...
...aside that fear, and behind it lies at least one reason for optimism. If the Lehigh Valley never sees the rise of another Bethlehem Steel, it will also never suffer such a fall. "That world is gone," says Mary Deily, a professor of economics at Lehigh University who has studied the decline of Big Steel. Today the failure of a big manufacturer in the region "is not going to be as devastating," she says. In this new world, office-supply makers apply for patents, better processes can trump cheaper products, and the most valuable raw material is an educated worker...