When President Joe Biden visits Maine on Friday to tout how his economic policies have boosted manufacturing jobs nationally, he will face a state transitioning from legacy industries that have lost jobs to high-tech ones that are growing but can’t find enough people to hire.
Manufacturing is a top five contributor to Maine’s gross domestic product, which sat at $6.6 billion in 2022. But the industry is undergoing a fundamental transition that has it losing 0.5 percent of its manufacturing jobs between June 2022 and June 2023, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers showed.
That’s a far cry from the lofty 6.4 percent rise in manufacturing jobs nationally to just shy of 800,000 that Biden is taking credit for since he took office in early 2021. While in Maine, he will make remarks on economic policy at Auburn Manufacturing, a maker of high-performance, heat-resistant fabrics and textiles.
Maine is unusual among U.S. states in that job losses in older industries, especially at paper mills, canceled out gains at manufacturers in newer growth industries, James Myall, policy analyst at the liberal Maine Center for Economic Policy, said. One example is the 230 workers at the Pixelle Specialty Solutions paper mill in Jay that lost their jobs when it closed in March.
“There has been a decline in some of the legacy industries in Maine at the same time there have been increases in things like pharmaceutical manufacturing and transportation equipment,” Myall said. “But those are canceled out by the paper mill layoffs.”
About 1,850 Maine manufacturing businesses employ more than 56,700 Maine workers now, according to the Manufacturers Association of Maine, an industry group. Payroll tops $3.6 billion and accounts for 12 percent of wages paid statewide. That is increasing as average weekly earnings rose from June 2022 to this year, up 6.6 percent, federal data showed.
“The number one issue for our membership is workforce development,” Mike Roughton, executive director of the Manufacturers Association of Maine, said. “But manufacturing as a whole is robust.”
That is the case at Kennebec Technologies, an Augusta-based precision components manufacturer that caters to aerospace, defense and technology clients. It saw its business pivot last summer when one of its largest customers gave it an unusually large, long-term order. For most of the 15 years the two companies worked together, that customer supplied only quick-turnaround, short-term orders.
The difference, said Kennebec board Chairman Charles “Wick” Johnson, was the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law last August by Biden to boost U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and competitiveness. He credited the act with boosting the confidence of his customer, which makes components for semiconductor chip and wafer manufacturing machines.
Johnson said the $1.2 trillion Inflation Reduction Act signed into law last August also is helping manufacturing by expanding broadband in the state, encouraging infrastructure updates and offshore wind development. Both laws are reasons for optimism that the country will invest in the future, he said.
“The biggest positive impact we’ve seen from the administration is the CHIPS Act,” Johnson said. “That was a very large order for us, a total change, and it was a direct result of their customer feeling positive about long-term investment.”
Myall agreed with Johnson that Biden’s policies impacting the manufacturing sector are on the right track.
“But it may be too early to know whether the scale of it is large enough,” he said.
