Quiz

Contributors to Manufacturing Crunch believe in manufacturing, but we all have our different ways to promote it. My take is that unless we get more young people interested very soon in innovating and inventing, and actually making stuff, the tidal wave of retirement of skilled workers that's coming ever closer is going to leave us high and dry with half-empty factories, which will be doubly tragic given that we're now winning the arguments against outsourcing all over the place.

There are great sites out there already, like Manufacturing Is Cool, Shop Rat and others, that try to do just this. But here's my take. It's called COOLXmas.

You see, I think lots of young people now have next to no perception of manufacturing industry at all. But they do have a very close relation to consumer goods, because their iPods and cellphones and access through IT to social media sites incubate a dependency on them. So they need to understand that these things are manufactured too, and provide jobs, inspire innovation, and importantly, can reduce deficits.

The COOLXmas Competition engages students with the manufacturing world around them in a unique way. They record the country of assembly of the consumer goods they encounter over Xmas (ie country of origin labelling, or COOL, as in COOLXmas) and submit it through their schools and colleges to our database at madeinnations, or to one of our partner sites like FindUSMade and others. The school or college that submits the most entries wins a cash prize.

The aim is to wake up young people to how few of the consumer goods they value and interact with hour by hour are actually made in their own country. This can then lead to school discussions about the economy, and all sorts of other issues centred on the country of origin (as final product assembly) of the products that teenage life centres around. They can get to grips with issues like the trade deficit, and why the service economy alone is incapable of employing everybody.

We hope that this will all lead back to understanding the need to manufacture more locally, to provide jobs, revitalise communities, and generate the wealth the West needs to stay independent. As a former educator and advocate of careers in manufacturing over two decades, I'd call that a real education.

You can visit the site at COOLXmas.org. It's hopefully a simple, honest and effective site. We've put together a classic set of resources for teachers, from the interview with James Goldsmith about globalization on Bloomberg in 1994 to Jason Dean's groundbreaking account of Hon Hai in Shenzhen (the OEM for Apple, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, and countless others) for the WSJ.

If you think young people need waking up to the real world (of things like financing trade deficits, for example) beyond the simplistic propaganda of the globalist lobby, you might want to check it out. You could always tell any teachers you know to give it a visit and see what they think. And if you've ever made any money from manufacturing, feel free to donate towards a prize for the winning school or college. You'd pay them directly of course. We don't want to make a profit. We want to make a point.


Graham Rankin runs madeinnations.com and founded COOLXmas.org.