Lost in the remnants of a 2020 pandemic and divisive election is the uplifting story of manufacturing’s ongoing U.S. comeback. We look back at 2020 this week in CompanyWeek, and one of the lessons is that American manufacturing has a chance to come all the way back from the devastation of globalization, and the lost 2000s, when the sector shed millions of jobs.

It’s a bright spot in an otherwise forgettable year.

That’s not to say it will look the same as when it left. The industries driving growth are food and beverage, transportation (manifest spectacularly in an EV and aerospace boom), machinery, and craft manufacturing ecosystems centered in San Francisco and other dynamic urban areas across the West. It’s a far cry from the heavy industry, computer and electronics, and textile and apparel mix that once defined manufacturing.

In many growth outposts throughout the country, manufacturing is holding up better than other more high-profile sectors. In early fall of 2020, when the wreckage of the COVID-19 economy came into view, as the smoke cleared, economists seemed surprised to find much of the manufacturing economy standing tall. In late September, David Hansen, senior economist at Development Research Partners, noted, “Colorado’s manufacturing sector had contracted 1.3 percent YTD, compared with 4 percent across all industries,” and that “manufacturing employment was actually up slightly over the year in July.”

Those trends are holding. Data we collected from 20 of our final interviews of the year pointed to a healthy and vibrant sector: 17 companies were revising revenue forecasts upward for 2021. Three said forecasts would remain the same. None forecast declining prospects.

Of course some manufacturing industries are teetering, threatened not by growing demand but by socio-political decisions and the residue of a disastrous national response to the pandemic. A second and third wave predicted last spring by scientists and health care professionals now threatens to swamp craft distillers and brewers. That most have been able to adapt and survive owes to ingenuity and work ethic, and a profound connection with U.S. consumers, the same connection that bodes well for them, and for manufacturing, in the future.

That said, a pitiful public sector response has bordered on criminal. Or comical. Who among California’s gubernatorial staff thought it a good idea to dine out in five-star style? Did Denver’s mayor write his apology before boarding the plane to fly to Mississippi to visit relatives over Thanksgiving? It reads as such.

But a special place in pandemic posterity is reserved for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who continues to lead an assault on facts and common sense. McCarthy objected to a House vote to decriminalize cannabis by tweeting, “This week, your House Democrat majority is tackling the tough issues by holding a vote on legalizing pot and banning tiger ownership. Nothing for small businesses. Nothing for re-opening schools. Nothing on battling the pandemic. Just cannabis and cats.”

It escapes McCarthy, who’s from California but apparently not there much, that cannabis is driving a small business boom in Cali — and in Colorado and other states that have realized whether you decriminalize or not, the cannabis economy will thrive. In Colorado, it’s a $1.5 billion sector, fueling over 50,000 jobs. McCarthy would leave this economy in the black market. To what end, one wonders? In the hopes it will go away? Tell that to Roy Lipski, CEO of San Diego-based CREO, poised to deliver fermented cannabinoids to the Fortune 500 and profiled this week.

It’s one of dozens of thriving manufacturing companies reshaping the economy and leaving us bullish on the future.

Bring on 2021.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Reach him at btaylor@companyweek.com.

We first interviewed Hale Foote in 2017, and Dan Sanchez’s profile of Foote’s spring and stamping company, Scandic, has stuck with me ever since. Scandic is a Tesla supplier, and Foote’s description of how the upstart automaker was bringing a Silicon Valley ethos to the manufacturing ecosystem in the Bay Area was fascinating.

I caught up with Foote again last week. He first asked about CompanyWeek, and agreed with my thought that things continue to line up for U.S. manufacturing. “Before COVID hit us, I was seeing more work come in from China in January,” he said. “There’s growing sentiment that we need to reshore some work.”

Here’s my Q&A with Hale Foote, owner of Scandic, a CompanyWeek Best of California manufacturer.

CompanyWeek: How’s life in the Tesla supply chain these days?

Hale Foote: Unchanged, but we’re kind of a unique animal here, we’re locked in to Model S and Model X, the first two big ones. The Model 3 and Model Y, we have not been heavily involved in. Tesla emerged as a more mature company and they were able to get Detroit suppliers to play ball, Chinese suppliers to play ball. But we’re locked in where we are, and we’re in a good spot.

CW: You’re in a unique position — you’ve been with Tesla through uncertain and volatile times, only to see it evolve into an industry phenomenon and Wall Street darling. What changed?

HF: Two things changed, one with Tesla internally, and two, with the world market.

First, Tesla began to get volume, and the traditional Detroit auto parts suppliers who had written them off as a California flake, started to see numbers that made sense, and that was largely due to Model 3, when they started selling hundreds of thousands of cars a year instead of 20,000 or 30,000, or even 50,000. So Tesla finally got it right, and not just with Model S and X, which were expensive, but Model 3 got people’s attention. That was the one.

Then externally, various governments around the world started seeing that EV is the way to go and decided, “Yes, we’re going to incentivize people to do it.” Everyone from GM to Ford started coming out with EVs that gave Tesla a whole lot more credibility.

And frankly, no one can touch them on infrastructure. The supercharger network and their batteries are their secret weapon, not the cars. So it was a combination of their own smarts, engineering and instinct for survival, and externally, governments around the world saying, “We need to go electric.”

CW: During their real volatile period, I recall there also being a lot of discussion around people and the loss of key production executives. Was Tesla focused on workforce all along?

HF: Yeah, I think a lot of that talk was driven by the auto establishment, saying, “Look, they’re just a Silicon Valley startup churning through people,” and there was some of that, but that’s Silicon Valley. They did start getting people coming in from the midwest, auto industry veterans who knew what they were doing. But it’s fascinating, since we’re here in the area, I see people now circling from Google to Apple to Tesla constantly. And what do Google and Apple have in common with Tesla? Smart engineers. There’s a huge cross-pollination of talent here.

CW: You made a comment in our interview three years ago that stuck with me, that “Bay Area companies like Tesla and Apple want to fail faster to succeed sooner.” So they’re doing more than that. They’re creating their own ecosystem of shared talent?

HF: So California has very strong protection for employees — non-competes are very disfavored here. California has always had strong worker protection, to say that “Hey Apple, you can’t shut this engineer down from going elsewhere.” And we’re seeing the upside of that here.

CW: So tell me about your company. Three years is a long time in your business. What’s new at Scandic?

HF: Yeah, so we just passed the 50-year mark last year, now in our second half-century, so we’re happy about that. On the people front, our big news is that our oldest daughter has just come back from Ohio to join the company and she’ll be taking over for me. Third-generation ownership, and we’re very excited about that.

CW: Was that in the works for a long time?

HF: No! She was like me, a liberal arts major, a different career, but saw the writing on the wall that this family business thing has worked pretty well. And it seems most of your readership is in the same position, a lot family businesses.

CW: Definitely one of the great attributes of manufacturing. So how’s the California business scene? The national narrative isn’t always the most positive.

HF: Yeah, the trade associations I belong to tend to be populated by more conservative business owners, and they always give me grief about, you could divest in California, why don’t you leave, taxes and regulations, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there’s a reason why people own companies here. There are thousands of businesses doing well here.

CW: I hear it all the time: “We love doing business here, we’d never leave, but man, it’s hard sometimes.”

HF: Yeah, we love doing business here, we’d never leave, and it’s not that hard!

CW: Do you think economic developers in California are supportive of manufacturing?

HF: Very much so. For example, the city where we’re located has always been a manufacturing city. They very much value companies like us — really job-dense, 50-person, high value-added employers. They’re not crazy about big-box warehouses. They want companies like us, that pay people well, people can buy houses and live that kind of life.

Is there environmental regulation? Of course there is. Is our water and air getting cleaner? Yes it is. So there are definite benefits to it. Yes, sometimes you’re going to be a little more expensive than someone in Nevada, but you know, they’re in Nevada and I’m in California.

CW: Where do you see opportunity going forward for Scandic? Where does Tesla fit?

HF: Tesla’s an important part of our business, but by no means the major part. They’re important, they’re solid, they’re steady, and at this point we’re a legacy supplier. It’s predictable, and it’s a good fit. But we’re not really an automotive supplier — they’re our only automotive customer, as opposed to my friends in Cleveland who have three customers. They work for the Big Three. That’s it. They live and die by how many F-150s sell that quarter.

We’re medical, we’re aerospace, we’re transportation, we’re safety systems.

CW: Will new technology open even more verticals for you? How about 3D printing?

HF: We make money on high-volume stuff, and additive manufacturing, in my experience, is not quite there. Making a product that takes 12 minutes to print is really not our market.

What is changing, and what’s going to change in my lifetime, is when we can print tooling, instead of building tooling over a period of months. When we can print the die, that will be a game changer for us.

For more coverage of California manufacturing, visit the CompanyWeek archive.

In a March 2014 column, I encouraged Cory Gardner to run on manufacturing to win a Colorado Senate seat. Six years ago, a Republican hadn’t won a statewide election for governor or U.S. Senate since 2002, and from my vantage point, the GOP was fishing about for a compelling electoral strategy:

“Gardner’s yet to articulate a platform but early pronouncements from the gubernatorial field provide strong clues. They suggest the GOP ticket will run on the repeal of Obamacare, Dem overreach on gun legislation, opposition to same-sex marriage and economic sluggishness — a slow recovery.

Will this platform appeal to young voters, women and minorities and social moderates in Colorado who increasingly decide elections? It’s principled. It’s also similar to what’s been defeated here before. And Gardner’s ‘Battle for the Future of America’ theme runs headlong against a few economic realities.

Contrary to the gloomy tone of the GOP’s economic assertions, growth and vitality are on display here. Energy is feeding an industrial comeback. Entrepreneurship is thriving. . . . On balance the Colorado economy is a formidable engine and compelling story, a national model in some respects. As Brian Burney, CEO of Oliver Manufacturing . . . told me, ‘It’s a good time to be a manufacturer.'”

So much has changed. And yet is hasn’t.

For one, it’s still a good time to be a manufacturer, and still a good idea to run on manufacturing.

David Hansen, senior economist at Development Research Partners, notes that “manufacturing seems to be one of the best performing industry supersectors so far [in 2020] in Colorado. Based on seasonally adjusted CES data, employment in Colorado’s manufacturing sector is down 1.3 percent YTD compared with 4 percent across all industries. Encouragingly, manufacturing employment was actually up slightly over the year in July. Our forecast for 2020 was 1 percent growth. The [CU Boulder Business Research Division’s] current forecast for manufacturing in 2020 is a -0.5 percent employment contraction.”

Yet still, both Gardner and his adversary, John Hickenlooper, don’t run on Colorado manufacturing, though they both could, each from a different point of view. Hickenlooper was a manufacturer, and Gardner’s been a quiet if effective advocate of Colorado’s sector.

Frankly, I’m not sure what either candidate is running on today. Perhaps each should revisit findings I referenced in the same 2014 column:

“Last week, Manufacturing & Technology News summarized research that, according to the publication, concludes, ‘There is a wide disconnect between the American public and policymakers in Washington, D.C., on the importance of manufacturing to the U.S. economy and the need for action to restore American industrial competitiveness.’ Or more succinctly, ‘Americans want Washington to deal with manufacturing, but Washington is not responding.’

M&T News reported on some of the findings:

When asked, ‘which of the following industries is the most important to the strength of the American economy?’ 32 percent of Americans said ‘manufacturing,” followed by 19 percent saying “high tech and knowledge industries,’ 12 percent saying health care, 11 percent saying agriculture, 8 percent saying housing and construction, 6 percent saying finance, and 4 percent saying services and retail.

Voters reject the idea that other sectors like high tech or services can replace manufacturing. Only 34 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that ‘the strength of the American economy is innovation and competition — and if manufacturing leaves, we will move into new areas like high tech or services which will take its place in the future.’

With 88 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement that ‘American manufacturing means American jobs,’ the survey found that ‘support for American manufacturing and manufacturers is nearly universal.’

Most Americans (84 percent) support the adoption of a national manufacturing strategy that is focused on tax, education, and trade policies (with 7 percent opposed to such a policy).”

As I noted in 2014, “Manufacturing may provide an opening for any candidate willing to make it a campaign issue.”

It’s never too late.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Reach him at btaylor@companyweek.com.