Restoring pride to ‘Made in America’ label

Written by Joe Pasani
Friday, 08 January 2010 12:10

Traveling on the train through Fairfield County, you’ll pass the steel and glass headquarters for RBS and UBS. You’ll also see the vestiges of a manufacturing era characterized by hard work and Yankee ingenuity, which produced the world’s finest products — firearms, typewriters, locks, sewing machines and many other things.

Cities like Bridgeport, Norwalk and Stamford were once centers of manufacturing that sent goods worldwide.

Many of the brick factories, which stretched for city blocks, are vacant and dilapidated. Others have been renovated into artists’ enclaves, office buildings and condos.

I see reminders of this past greatness everywhere. My vintage typewriters include a Blickensderfer, which was made in Stamford and used a typing ball decades before the invention of the IBM Selectric.

My LeCount cribbage boards, once sold worldwide, were manufactured in Norwalk, and one of the finest straight-edge razors was made in Bridgeport during the 19th century by Challenge Cutlery Co. Like the .22 caliber rifle my father gave me as a teenager, which was manufactured by Remington Arms in Bridgeport, all these products bore the label, “Made in America.”

Times have changed. “Made in America,” which was traditionally a statement of national pride, now seems as uninspired as the stock market on a bad day.

We live in a technological age — an age when people believe an honest day’s work is sending e-mail, an age when gadgets like smart-phones have a short shelf-life, an age when “quality” isn’t defined by what lasts but by what’s trendy.

Consider the changes in the American workplace. Over the past decades, the phrases you heard most often were “leveraged buyout,” “outsourcing” and “greed.” Now, our economy is founded on services rather than the production of goods.

But the greatest country in the world shouldn’t outsource everything from customer service to newspaper production, and the greatest country in the world should be able to manufacture better products than the Chinese, the Japanese and the Europeans.

Each year, America imports $850 billion more in goods than it exports. Quite simply, we buy more things made overseas than we produce here. As a result, millions of jobs have been lost over the past 30 years — manufacturing employs only 4 million people and represents 12 percent of the U.S. economy.

Instead of “Made in America,” you see “Made in China,” “Made in Vietnam” and “Made in El Salvador.”

“The fight for American manufacturing is the fight for America’s future,” President Obama has said.

Many companies have shipped their manufacturing overseas to cut costs and gain access to foreign markets. China offers the fiercest competition because wages are much lower and there are fewer environmental regulations.

Traditionally, manufacturing fueled the U.S. economy, but now there is concern a national policy is needed to keep jobs here and make us the world’s leading manufacturing power again.

So much, too, depends on our personal decisions. When I went to the store for socks, I found some made in China and some made in Vermont, USA. I bought the American brand.

Joe Pisani can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .