Advancing U.S. competitiveness means retooling the work force

By Marcy Lowe

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address rightly emphasized global competitiveness. But it’s likely many viewers were left with a burning question. Will this new vision get me a job?

The answer is not simple. Today’s economy is so globally connected that the components for almost any product — from an airliner to a T-shirt — can come from any number of countries. To give a thoughtful answer about jobs — especially green jobs linked to clean energy and infrastructure — we need to take a close look at how products get manufactured.

In 2009, when the Obama administration first announced its $8 billion plan to develop high-speed rail, our research team at Duke University was asked to study the U.S. potential for manufacturing passenger railcars. We mapped out the supply chain and, to no one’s surprise, found an industry dominated by European and Japanese firms; the U.S. essentially abandoned passenger rail 50 years ago in favor of roads.

But when we broke down the green job vision into concrete parts, it started to look doable.

When we took a closer look at the component level of manufacturing passenger railcars, we found an unexpectedly high 249 U.S. locations in 35 states were already involved in this process. Because only a fraction of these firms appeared in public data, we had to call around to find them.

Perhaps more important, our bottom-up framework of talking with these firms found gaps in work force capabilities. This is central to U.S. competitiveness because if a major barrier to making high-speed railcars domestically is that workers don’t have a specific welding expertise, then the obvious fix is to provide the training.

To date, we have analyzed 14 different clean-energy value chains (including solar, wind, electric vehicles and the smart grid), and this allows us to see important synergies. Technology advances in power electronics, for instance, are crucial to hybrid vehicles, high-efficiency industrial motors, and the smart grid. Other components that tend to pop up in clean-energy fields are advanced lightweight materials, nanotechnology and energy storage.

Not many people would guess that electric vehicle batteries could help solar and wind power, but harnessing these energy sources at a grid scale requires adding backup power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing. A smarter grid would allow electricity to flow both ways, so that electric car owners could store energy in their batteries and later sell it back to the grid when it’s most needed.

With such powerful synergies, embracing clean energy is not gambling on “winners,” as some critics have suggested. It’s more about recognizing the bases we need to cover. And it’s about retraining our work force — not just for clean energy, but throughout the industrial base — if our economy and workers are to compete.

Obama called our need to make this investment our generation’s Sputnik moment. This takes a commitment to reinforcing our strengths and making a fine-grained assessment of where we need to improve. The vision makes sense. Now let’s do the strategizing, and the training, to get there.

Marcy Lowe is a senior research analyst at Duke University’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness.