Greatness never comes easy. The adage has never been more true for the stellar list of companies gathered last week in Denver, where winners of the 2021 Colorado Manufacturing Awards accepted trophies in person after a virtual “winners reveal” in April. Smiles, and a welcome sense of normalcy, displaced months of uncertainty and at times […]
America’s manufacturing workforce crisis may be most acute in California, where 70,000 manufacturing jobs are unfilled. We caught up with Jim Watson, CEO of California’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership Center, who describes the embrace of technology and automation underway in response.CompanyWeek: Let’s start with the obvious question: has COVID-related remote employment exacerbated an already difficult environment […]
NOCOM, the NoCo Manufacturing Partnership’s Manufacturing and Trades Show, returns September 23 this year after an 18-month hiatus due to COVID-19. Attendees will gather at The Ranch on the Larimer County Fairgrounds in Loveland, Colorado. The in-person event arrives at a delicate time: The Delta variant is again giving companies and people pause about gathering. […]
We’ve asked the most recent 30 companies we’ve featured in CompanyWeek to share some anecdotal information about where employees are working, their vaccination status as, or if, they return from remote work, and whether companies are requiring COVID vaccinations. Here’s their feedback: CW: What percentage of employees who went remote are returning or have returned? […]
In many ways the national manufacturing narrative has moved beyond the apocalyptic themes of a decade ago. Ten years of growth has changed everything. Yet naysayers persist, and today the unlikely source is The Heritage Foundation, the respected conservative Washington D.C. think tank. In “Biden’s Manufacturing Plan: Wasteful Investment in Industry of Past,” Research Fellow […]
Late in June, my family’s six-month journey to relocate from Colorado to Texas ended successfully in New Braunfels, Texas — the new headquarters for CompanyWeek. In the end we’d hoped a move like this was easy, or normal, as if picking up and moving for no reason, other than we wanted to, was seen as […]
Harry Moser’s Reshoring Initiative measures the degree to which U.S. companies are reshoring jobs and attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). With interest and activity heightened from the pandemic, trade wars, and other factors, I reached out for an update. As with any conversation today about reshoring manufacturing jobs, we talked extensively about China, and a […]
We’ve reported how Colorado lags in large manufacturing-related infrastructure investments, but despite another subpar year relative to other states, a flurry of recent activity lately demonstrates how things could be changing. Last week alone, three significant new factories were announced, in three growth industries powering Colorado manufacturing. York Space Systems‘ new “mega-center” in Denver, Meati‘s […]
One casualty of our political paralysis is momentum to enact supply chain and manufacturing initiatives that appeared to have bipartisan support coming out of the election. Today we can’t seem to agree on the need to agree. I thought as much reading Robert O’Brien’s insights last week in Bloomberg, “Supply Chains Are Our Most Critical […]