Five Million And Counting, Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue North Plant Success Story

Five Million And Counting

Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue North Plant

Success Story Continues

By Rod Kackley

A Chrysler assembly plant that became iconic of the problems facing the Detroit auto industry in 2009 when workers were arrested for using drugs on their lunch breaks, and one worker killed another in 2012 before taking his own life, has now become a symbol of the reinvention of auto manufacturing in Michigan.

The five-millionth vehicle rolled off the assembly line inside Chrysler Group’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant in the heart of Detroit, August 13.

The 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland in Billet Silver rolled off the JNAP assembly line on Tuesday, Aug. 13 at 2:30 a.m. 


In addition to the standard Trenton, Mich.-built 3.6-liter Pentastar engine and Kokomo, Ind.-built eight-speed transmission, the vehicle has an 8.4-inch Touch Screen Radio, GPS navigation, Blind Spot and Rear Cross Path Detection, Adaptive Speed Control, leather heated and ventilated seating, Panoramic Sunroof and Quadra-Lift Air Ride Suspension.

Some 50 JNAP employees (pictured above), each with 30 or more years with the plant, were front-and- center as the 5 millionth vehicle, a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland, was driven into the staging area and parked right next to a 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokee.


Although the facility was nearly closed in the darkest days of the Great Recession, 1,100 new employees were added to the payroll in the three-million-square-foot factory in October 2012.

Nearly 4,500 people now work inside the plant every day. In 2012, they produced more than 291-thousand vehicles.

In addition to the Jeep Grand Cherokee, Jefferson North also produced the Jeep Commander from 2005-2010 and began production of the Dodge Durango in December 2010.

The former Jefferson Assembly Plant, built in 1907 by Chalmers Motor Car Company, was twice the size of the new plant's original footprint (3.6 million square feet compared to 1.75 million square feet, respectively) and produced a total of 8,310,107 vehicles in its 83-year history.

Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance is a five-part ebook essay series that tells the story of the fall and rise of the Detroit Three, and the twenty-first century entrepreneurs who are digging new revenue streams.
Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance is available through Amazon and Vook.com.
For free previews, please go to www.rodkackley.com.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids created a new cluster of prosperity, Medical Mile, during the Great Recession. 
For a free previews and to order your autographed edition, please go to www.rodkackley.com

How Much Is Too Much? When Does The Bubble Burst or The Beer Go Flat?

The steady growth of American craft brewing continued during the first half of 2013, according to mid-year data released by the Brewers Association.

During the first six months of 2013, American craft beer dollar sales and volume were up 15 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Over the same period last year, dollar sales jumped 14 percent and volume increased 12 percent.

During the first half of 2013, approximately 7.3 million barrels of beer were sold by small and independent craft brewers, up from 6.4 million barrels over the first half of 2012. American craft beer continues to grow despite decreased overall beer sales, which were down two percent through the first six months of the year.

There are 2,538 breweries operating in the U.S. as of June 30, 2013, an increase of 446 breweries since June 2012. The Brewers Association  also lists an additional 1,605 breweries in planning at the year’s midpoint, compared to 1,252 a year ago.

As of June 30, 2013, the count of craft breweries was at 2,483, showing that 98 percent of U.S. brewers are craft brewers. Craft brewers currently employ an estimated 108,440 full-time and part-time workers, many of which are manufacturing jobs, contributing significantly to the U.S. economy.

We haven’t seen this many breweries in America since the nineteenth century. But, how many is too many? How much is too much? Are we close to a bubble or the beer going flat?
For some insight into that and how two Michigan craft-brewing entrepreneurs feel about the future, please click here for Quenching The Thirst, Chapter Four: The Future.

Quenching The Thirst is the fifth ebook essay in the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series. To download your copy for 99 cents, please click here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of Grand Rapids, Michigan's desperate race not to be the next Detroit and is available wherever books are sold online. For an autographed hardcover or softcover book please visit Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center or Schuler Books & Music-28th Street.

Personally autographed copies can be ordered by clicking the Add To Cart button on the Welcome Page of www.rodkackley.com.

Quenching The Thirst, Chapter Three: The Entrepreneurs

Quenching The Thirst

Chapter Three: The Entrepreneurs

(An excerpt)

By Rod Kackley

Entrepreneurs are the dreamers who create a solution, or come up with a way to satisfy a demand, or dare I write it, a thirst.

It is only right that Michigan is growing so many new breweries, so many new craft beers and so many new entrepreneurs in this space. We like our beer. That is our history.
Detroit has Frederick Ams to thank for bringing lager to what would become the Motor City.

The German brewer moved to Detroit in 1848. He was followed by another German, Bernhard Stroh, who also established himself in Detroit. Anyone with any history in Michigan knows how important that name, Stroh, was to Michigan and especially to Detroit. The name “Stroh” was right up their with Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, and General Motors. Two more of their countrymen would follow and Detroit soon had four breweries.

For a couple of centuries beer had a better reputation than water in America. It was certainly safer to drink. Same thing was true for whiskey. Yet, beer did develop a bad name for years in Detroit, in Michigan and across the nation.  Same thing happened to whiskey and that was followed by Prohibition. However, once that legislative mistake was erased from the U.S. Constitution, the beer industry was soon flourishing again in Detroit.

Michigan’s 40 breweries were pumping out 3.25 million barrels of beer every year by 1940, with 15 of them operating  in Detroit.

Those good times did not last.

By 1962, only two breweries were left in Detroit thanks to a wave of consolidation, acquisition and failure. Soon that number would be down to one. Stroh’s—created by the family of Bernhard Stroh, was the last to fall.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community shows how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan created a cluster of prosperity while the rest of Michigan was crumbling around them.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is available wherever books are sold. 

For an autographed edition, click here





John Pannell, an Englishman, built the first brewery in Grand Rapids in 1836. Christopher Kusterer followed him in 1847 and he was followed by the Gottlieb brothers.

Grand Rapid Brewing Company—remember that name it will pop up again—was incorporated in 1892. Prohibition forced a name change and a new business direction for Grand Rapids Brewing Company in 1918. The new name: Grand Rapids Products Company. The new product: a soft drink called Silver Foam.

Furniture City Brewing, even though the name was anything but appetizing, was another of the early players that had to shift direction because of Prohibition selling a non-alcoholic beer known as Nu-Bru.  Petersen Brewing changed its name to Petersen Beverage, pushing a drink called Vita.

Just like in Detroit, when Prohibition ended in 1933, beer started flowing again in Grand Rapids and the brewers went back to work making what they loved. Furniture Brewing and Grand Rapids Brewing merged under the latter name, only to become part of Michigan Brewing Co. in 1936. 

Four years later, Michigan Brewing would be producing 500,000 to 600,000 barrels of beer a year.

~RTR~

Sixty years later, a new generation of craft-brewing entrepreneurs would bring new life to the tradition of making beer in Michigan. For a preview of that story, please click here.

Quenching The Thirst is the ebook essay in the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series that tells the stories of the new wave of entrepreneurs driving the creation of the craft brewing industry in Michigan.
You can download your copy of Quenching The Thirst for just 99-cents by clicking here.

Other excerpts are available on this blog, feel free to scroll through them, or at www.rodkackley.com.

Quenching The Thirst, Chapter Two: The Brewers

Quenching The Thirst

Chapter Two: The Brewers 

(An excerpt)

By Rod Kackley

As with any supplier in any supply chain, the Steinman family’s success will be limited to a large degree by the success of their customers, the craft brewers in Michigan. That success is not a given. Even though beer is something of a food staple in Michigan and the Great Lakes region,  brewing beer is not a license to print money.

The Steinmans and everyone in this book may  love beer, but the fact is that beer’s popularity has been falling faster than the foam in an  open bottle of suds left on a picnic table during a July heat wave. According to a story printed in the October 21, 2012 edition of Advertising Age the brewing industry had been on a real downward slide since 2008 until it began picking up in 2012. 

Beer volume sales were up 1.4 percent for the fiscal year ending Sept. 25, as compared to year ago numbers. Here’s good news for Jeff and Bonnie Steinman. Most of that bounce back came from the craft brewing industry. The mega-brewers like Anheuser Busch were still in a spiral.

It is not that the world isn’t thirsty for beer. It is. The world likes its beer, with China leading the way, according to a survey commissioned by one of the largest brewers in Japan. 

The United States is thirsty for beer, just not as thirsty as China. Kirin Holdings puts the U.S. second in the world, consuming 11 percent of the world’s beer. However, China drank 25 percent of what the world’s brewers put out, which was a total of close to 60 billion gallons of beer.

Michigan is falling in love with craft-brewed beer. Michigan Brewers Guild Executive Director Scott Graham believes Jeff and Bonnie Steinman have made a good bet. The state is fifth in the nation in the number of breweries, microbreweries and brewpubs. He said sales of Michigan-made beer in Michigan—he doesn’t track sales outside the state—were  up about 27-percent in 2012 as compared to the previous year. He also pointed out that follows year after year of double-digit growth.

Michigan doesn’t have any brewer on the scale of Anheuser-Busch. However, beer is still more than a cottage or hobby industry for Michigan’s economy. Graham  said the craft brewing industry pumps  for more than $24 million in wages with an economic contribution of well over $133 million. State officials said that Michigan collected $42.1 million in beer tax revenue in FY 2010-2011. Admittedly that pales in comparison to liquor tax revenue ($135 million) and does not even come close to the tobacco tax revenue collected that fiscal year of more than $974 million. Yet,  Graham doesn’t see any problem with labeling Michigan, “The Great Beer State.” 

With 118 craft breweries in the state, Jeff and Bonnie would seem to have plenty of customers in Michigan. However, that might be a problem. Could  it be that the industry is doing too well? Is it possible to have too many craft breweries?  Could this be a craft-brewed beer bubble that is in danger of exploding

“I think at some point, it probably is possible,” admitted Graham. “But, right now we have about three-and-a-half-percent of the market. That is lagging behind the national trend. We have a goal of achieving a 10 percent share.”

Quenching The Thirst, part of the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance ebook essay series, tells the story of Michigan’s craft brewing entrepreneurs. For a free preview and download, please click here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the inspirational story of how the people of Grand Rapids, faced with the worst economy Michigan had ever seen, changed the way the world sees their community and the way they see the world.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is available wherever books are sold online including Abbott Press. Autographed editions are available by clicking on the Add To Cart button on the Welcome Page of www.rodkackley.com.

Light Vehicle Assembly Numbers Forecast To Grow, But It's OK To Keep Your Fingers Crossed

Global light vehicle assembly is expected to reach 81 million units in 2013, an increase of 2.3 percent compared to 2012, according to Autofacts, PwC's automotive analyst group. While the global market is expected to see positive growth overall, there are a number of mixed signals at the regional level. North America and Developing Asia-Pacific markets are driving most of the growth, while Developed Asia-Pacific is expected to see continued declines as assembly is localised abroad. The European Union, meanwhile, is not expected to see volume recovery until 2014.

Auto isn't the only manufacturing sector driving Michigan's economy. Take a look at what the new entrepreneurs in craft brewing are doing with beer.

Quenching The Thirst is part of the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance ebook essay series. For a preview, please click here.

"Economic performance is anticipated to remain mixed through the remainder of 2013," said Rick Hanna, PwC's global automotive leader.  "However, we do see light at the end of the tunnel and are forecasting a global compound annual growth rate of approximately 5 percent, double the 2013 rate, through 2017."

Strong growth in Developing Asia-Pacific, improving stability in the EU and investment in new technologies will drive the industry forward.  

Autofacts forecasts annual global light vehicle assembly to reach 101 million by 2017.

Megatrends driving the global automotive industry:

• European Union - While assembly was expected to recover in 2013, Autofacts is forecasting a year-over-year drop of 4 percent to approximately 15.3 million units in EU assembly. The long awaited rebound is now not expected until early 2014 at the earliest, as we see decrease in light vehicle assembly drop (-500k) in the first half of 2013. New vehicle demand fell by 4.7 percent in June, and 8.1 percent year-to-date, while the light commercial vehicle sector continues to decline, with registrations down 7.3 percent in May and 6.2 percent for the first five months of the year.
• North America - While the world is waiting for the recovery of the EU, North American sales and assembly increased through the first half of 2013, contributing 13.4 percent to global growth. The region is forecasted to contribute approximately 770 thousand units to the global topline growth in 2013. One regional manufacturing trend sparking interest is the "3-crew" or "3-2-120" shift pattern (wherein three crews work two shifts at 10 hours for six days a week) being implemented at selectDetroit 3 plants to help meet the excess demand, which allows for increased assembly utilisation.
• Developing Asia-Pacific - Light vehicle sales showed strong growth in 2013 compared to 2012, with Developing Asia-Pacific delivering an increase of 2.24 million units. Particularly notable are SUVs and MPVs, up 45.1 percent and 26.8 percent, respectively, compared to last year. Although 2013 has started off well for vehicle assembly, Autofacts is forecasting a modest 9.7 percent growth in assembly for the full-year, and jumping to 13.2 percent in 2014, despite global economic climate constraints.
• Research and Development Growth - R&D continues to grow as the industry approaches a new era of innovation and collaboration. Autofacts forecasts a steady release of new technologies into vehicles over the coming years, while others are not expected to reach mass production for some time. Hybrid, electric and fuel cell vehicle production accounted for roughly 2.8 percent of global light vehicle assembly in 2012.  This is expected to increase to approximately 5 percent by 2017, as industry collaboration drives costs down and performance metrics are simultaneously improved. The development and integration of new technology into vehicles to improve safety, fuel efficiency, communications and infotainment continues to accelerate and proves to be an increasing trend in the auto industry.

For more details about PwC's quarterly forecast update, download the July issue of PwC's Analyst Note at: www.autofacts.com or download the Autofacts iPad application.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan have changed the way the world sees their community and the way they see the world.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is available wherever books are sold online including Abbott Press and www.rodkackley.com, as well as on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee on Monroe Center, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

For a free preview, please click here.

Stand Or Sit, You Don't Get To Decide

Given the importance of the office furniture industry in West Michigan, this seems important. Even if you don't care about Steelcase, Herman Miller or Haworth, haven't you been sitting long enough today?
                                             

New Survey: To Sit or Stand? Almost 70% of Full Time American Workers Hate Sitting, but They do it all Day Every Day

Simple Changes Can Make a Big Difference in Health and Productivity

ST. PAUL, Minn., July 17, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Most Americans have to sit all day at work and they despise it.  A new survey commissioned by Ergotron, a global manufacturer of digital display mounting, furniture, and mobility products including sit-stand desks, found that nearly 70 percent of full time American workers hate sitting, yet 86 percent do it all day, every day. When they do get up, more than half (56 percent) use getting food as an excuse.

On top of all of that sitting at work, and for meals and commuting, the respondents:

• Sit another 1-2 hours while watching TV (36 percent)
• Game another 1-2 hours (10 percent)
• Lounge for 1-2 hours for things such as reading (25 percent)
• Use their home computer for 1-2 hours (29 percent)

In total, Americans are sitting an average of 13 hours a day and sleeping an average of 8 hours resulting in a sedentary lifestyle of around 21 hours a day. While Americans know about the importance of exercise, only 31 percent go to the gym, and 56 percent devote less than $10 per month to staying active. However, 96 percent would be willing to stand more to improve their health or life expectancy, and 30 percent even responded that they would rather go without coffee for a week to stand.

The survey also found that the vast majority (93 percent) didn't know what "Sitting Disease" is, but 74 percent believe that sitting too much could lead to an early death. The term "Sitting Disease" has been coined by the scientific community and is commonly used when referring to metabolic syndrome and the ill-effects of an overly sedentary lifestyle. Just last month, the American Medical Association adopted a policy recognizing potential risks of prolonged sitting and encouraging employers, employees and others to make available alternatives to sitting.

"Research is showing links between sedentary lifestyles and diabetes, several types of cancer, obesity and cardiovascular disease," said Jane Payfer, an Ergotron spokesperson. "There is a significant opportunity for people to change their behavior in the workplace and for corporations to change their cultures. Standing increases energy, burns extra calories, tones muscles, improves posture, increases blood flow, reduces blood sugar levels and ramps up metabolism. Frequently overlooked, standing more is the simplest, easiest change someone can make."   

This is Ergotron's second survey in three years on the effects of sitting for office workers.  The 2010 survey can be found here.   

Resources:

• An Infographic illustrating the survey findings can be viewed at JustStand.org.
• 8 ways to stand more every day.
• Ergotron's  JustStand™ Index – Revisited annually, the Index will show the growth of awareness around the problems of sitting  and will quantify the following questions:

1. Do you know what sitting disease is?
2. Are you aware of sit/stand computing products?
3. Have you requested sit/stand products at work?

For more detail and analysis of the survey findings, the JustStand® Report by Ergotron is available athttp://www.juststand.org/portals/3/literature/SurveyIndexReport.pdf. The Survey and Index results are being presented at the 3^rd Annual JustStand Wellness Summit today, via live stream atJuststand.org/summit.

Did you know Steelcase was born out of the need to stop office fires? Too many men were flicking too many hot cigar ashes in the wooden waste baskets at their desks. Metal Office Furniture came to the rescue, and later would become Steelcase.

That is one of the stories told in Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community, the story of how the people of Grand Rapids are changing the way the world sees their community.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is available wherever books are sold online including Abbott Press, and also on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee on Monroe Center.

Autographed copies are available by clicking the Add To Cart button on the Welcome Page of www.rodkackley.com

Right To Work: Outrage In Michigan, Chapter One By Rod Kackley

Right To Work: Outrage in Michigan

By Rod Kackley

Chapter One: Shock and Awe

Two dozen Michigan State Police squad cars filled with troopers in riot gear screeched to a stop in front of the state Capitol, one day in late November. They were ready to block what they were told would be hundreds of marauding, soon-to-riot teachers and other public sector employees who seemed ready to storm the Palace of Republicanism—the GOP-controlled Governor’s Office and both houses of the Legislature, in Lansing Michigan.


Troopers braced themselves like helmeted, baton carrying, Tasers at the ready, hockey referees who would be  blocking the biggest fight on the ice they had ever seen.


After years of gently simmering on the political stove in Michigan, with spices and seasonings tossed in occasionally from the right and the left, one cook turning down the heat after the other moved the knob higher for a moment, the stew that is Right to Work legislation had come to full boil in Michigan.


What this really came down to is the state of Michigan  divided by an us versus them, management versus labor mentality. This is what had been simmering for years, put on the back burner by union and corporate officials during the decade from Hell that was the 1990s in Michigan. This is what boiled over in December.


This was also Michigan’s history. It is one of labor strife from the shores of Lake Michigan on the West to Lake St. Clair on the East . As 2012 entered its final month, the labor battle was on.


The first days of December were filled with smell of pepper spray, the din of acrimonious shouts and the pain of fists landing on faces as the two sides of the right-to-work (or Freedom To Work as supporters dubbed it) turned vocal and then physical.


One anti-right-to-work protestor hauled back and threw a roundhouse left into the face of a Fox News employee. There has never been any love lost between those two sides of the political spectrum. The Fox employee took the punch well. He even offered to drop an assault charge if the guy with the hard left would agree to meet him in the cage for an MMA-style battle “like a real man,” to raise money for charity.


Emotions were raging at such a roiling, boiling, state of Wisconsin-like vitriolic level because chefs on both sides had turned the heat up as high as it would go. The GOP, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, Big Labor and  Democrats are pointing fingers at each other, looking each other in the eye saying, “He started it.” Guess what? They were all correct. 


Democrats and Big Labor put two ballot propositions before voters in November. They were both very pro-union. They were also proposals that Republicans and Michigan Chamber of Commerce President Rich Studley said labor union leaders and Democrats had promised to keep off the ballot.


The promise was broken. The gloves came off. 

Right To Work: Outrage in Michigan is available for immediate download by clicking here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan changed the way the world sees their community and the way they see the world. If they can do it, your community can do it too.

Autographed editions are available by click Add To Cart on www.rodkackley.com, as well as on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is also available wherever books are sold online including Abbott Press.

Right To Work: Outrage In Michigan, Chapter Three By Rod Kackley

Right To Work: Outrage in Michigan

By Rod Kackley

Chapter Three: Battle Lines Drawn

(Author’s note: This is an excerpt from Right To Work: Outrage in Michigan, one of the ebook essays in the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series.)

Michigan AFL-CIO President Karla Swift bet her ranch that Governor Rick Snyder would be the final blockade against the GOP-Chamber of Commerce tsunami that Right to Work had become. She and other labor leaders believed that Snyder, the Republican that Big Labor worked so hard—and failed—to defeat in November 2010, would be the union’s best hope of turning the heat down under the Right to Work stew.


 “You know, (Rick) Snyder has said it is not on his agenda and he wants to move forward with what he calls his ‘relentless positive action items,’” Michigan AFL-CIO President Karla Swift explained without a hint of irony in her voice. “We agree with him and we have made that clear multiple times over the last year and a half.”
Color her mistaken.
Snyder was pushed to the right on this issue by conservative Republicans — bankrolled by conservative billionaires like Dick DeVos — who vowed to mount a 2014 reelection campaign against him if the “Tough Nerd” in the Governor’s office disappointed them.
Conservative Republicans promised to hold it against the second-term Governor if he vetoed or ignored the legislation. They had the money.They had the votes. They had the energy. Most importantly, they had the anger to make good on that threat.
The Michigan business community had been standing with its fists clenched, shoulders tensed, leaning forward, ready for a fight over right-to-work for years. They were pushed to the brink by the November 2012 elections. Their emotions were running white hot because of the ballot proposals that were pushed by Big Labor. The state’s business leaders were outraged.
Several business organization leaders, along with top-level Republicans, told me that they had promised to block the right-to-work movement as long as the state’s union bosses agreed to not ask voters to constitutionally protect the right to bargain and organize.
If that was the deal, Labor broke it. Big Business had been blind-sided by Big Labor and Big Labor lost.
Their pro-union proposals that would have guaranteed the right of collective bargaining in Michigan were crushed by voters.
Now it was time for retribution. Or as Michigan Chamber of Commerce President Rich Studley said, “Actions have consequences.”
State Sen. Patrick Colbeck and Rep. Mike Shirkey had been waiting not very patiently in their corners, gloves laced up, legislation ready, just waiting for the bell to begin that fight. They both want to make Right to Work happen.
It was time for the bell to sound. Round Two was beginning.

Restore The Roar: Outrage in Michigan tells the story of how Right To Work became the law in Michigan. It is available for immediate download by clicking here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids have changed the way the world sees their community and the way they see the world is available wherever books are sold online including Abbott Press.

Autographed editions are available by clicking here and on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Grand Rapids.

Where Are The Workers? Finding the lost generation

Where Are The Workers?

Finding the Lost Generation

By Rod Kackley

Author’s note: This is an excerpt from Where Are The Workers? It is the second essay in the ebook series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance.

The survivors are picking up the pieces, bandaging their wounds, helping each other as warriors do for other warriors. While they move forward, the combatants who are as weary as any of the fighters who came before them are sneaking peeks over their shoulders, hoping they will see platoons of reinforcements who are ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in battles that never end.
But they aren’t there. The reinforcements have yet to arrive, at least not in the numbers needed.
Manufacturing is on its way back led by the automotive industry. However, the case is also being made that manufacturing isn’t ready for the revival, especially the suppliers who are chained up to the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).
Here’s the story of a real warrior, a man who saw actual combat. Now he is facing a new and in some ways more difficult challenge.
Bryan Heath survived Marine Corps boot camp and three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, but never realized how tough it would be to find a job in the civilian world.
After knocking his head against the employment wall with job after job that went nowhere, Heath was doing his internship on the shop floor at Commercial Tool & Die Inc. (CTD) when I met him near Grand Rapids, Mich. He was continuing to take classes across the street at Expert Tech LLC, a sister company of CTD, part of the Commercial Tool Group family of companies. Expert Tech was set up to find that missing generation who for one reason or another has decided that factory life is not for them.
 “Learning this trade is something I will be able to use for the rest of my life,” Heath said. “This was the perfect opportunity to step in and say, ‘this is who I am.’”
Kind of like what he did in boot camp? Bryan looked me in the eye and said, “Yes sir.”
Commercial Tool & Die opened Expert Tech, to help itself and its competitors, as well as people like Bryan Heath. It’s an effort to deal with an industrial crisis born of the rebirth of manufacturing in West Michigan. Business is booming. The demand is there after a decade that was lost to the industrial sector. Now the problem is finding people trained in the skill sets that are needed.
“The community colleges have pulled back, the voc-tech schools are not as prevalent as they used to be. There just isn’t the infrastructure there used to be support skill and knowledge development in our trade,” Commercial Tool and Die President Todd Finley said.
Quite simply, the talent pool is nearly drained and could become a barely damp puddle.
 “We have really gutted our educational pipeline for skilled manufacturing,” Expert Tech President Ryan Pohl explained. “There is no feeder pipeline for people coming in with basic skills.”
Filling that pool company by company could be an insurmountable challenge because although it is something every shop should be doing, let’s be honest; some are so small that they are running as fast as they can just to stay in place. There’s no money and no time to put together anything close to an in-house training program.
That is why CDT formed Expert Tech. “Give me someone who will show up every day and work hard,” said Pohl, “and we will train them for a company or I will train someone for free, betting I can find work for them.”
Finding these hardworking, show-up-everyday-people is not a problem. There are plenty of college graduates, with four-year degrees, $35-thousand a year jobs and five-or-six figure student loans to pay back.
“The college bubble is real,” said Pohl. “People are realizing they can’t pay off their student loans and they are waking up to the reality that there is potential in this industry.”

For the rest of this story, including how Bryan Heath is doing today, please click here for an immediate download of Where Are The Workers?

The entire Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series is available through Amazon,Barnes & Noble, iTunes and Vook.com.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan have changed the way the world sees their community and the way their community sees the world.

Personally autographed hardcover and softcover editions can be ordered by clicking the Buy Now button the Welcome Page. on www.rodkackley.com.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community is also available wherever books are sold including Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Grand Rapids.

Hardcover, softcover and ebook editions are available wherever books are purchased online including Abbott Press.

The Great Collapse, The Years When Everything Went Wrong

The Great Collapse

Chapter One

By Rod Kackley

Author’s note: This is an excerpt from the Great Collapse, the first in  the ebook essay series, Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance.
(Photo: Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant, from Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled exhibition)


Life was good. We were living the American Dream. Manufacturing is what made it all happen. Manufacturing is what made it all possible. Manufacturing was the industry that drove possibilities. It meant we Boomers could go to college. It meant our parents could look forward to a retirement with grandchildren, Social Security, a pension and health care.

Even if you never set foot in a factory, you reaped the benefits. Companies that didn’t have unions still had to compete with union pay and benefits or they would never get anyone decent. Manufacturing made all of that happen for all of us.

Don’t think for a minute that it was the corporations alone that made it happen.  It was the people on the lines, assembly and picket lines. It was the people who had made it to the Middle Class in their blue collars who reached down and pulled more people up to stand with them. They were the people who pumped money back into the economy. They were the people who were the job creators. They just didn’t know it at the time.

The auto industry brought my family to Michigan from Missouri. It is the typical story of a family facing hard times in the Depression, moving with what little they could carry in their trucks, a Grapes of Wrath movement north. My father and his brother would be sent back to the farms for the summer so that their mother could get more hours in at the GM plant in Flint.  Back home, they used BB guns to shoot cockroaches off the walls of the apartment they would have to leave as soon as the rent came due.

It was the auto industry that put bread on my father’s table in those days and it was that GM plant in Flint that helped my grandmother move them into the Middle Class. It was the auto industry that employed my father’s mother, a single parent widowed at an early age. It was the auto industry where anyone in Flint with the last name of “Kackley” could find a job in the plants because of my grandmother’s tenure with General Motors.

And it was the auto industry that my father ran from, joking that he escaped from the auto factory assembly line, entering World War Two, so he could finally get some “peace and quiet.”

It was the unions that won, for single parents like my grandmother from the South a chance at a new life, a more than livable wage, a fairly decent work environment, and most importantly a sense of justice.

It was the unions that battled for the workers. Union leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their “rank-and-file” walking picket lines in the snow and bitterly cold winds of Michigan, fighting toe-to-toe in mortal hand-to-hand combat with the thugs hired by the Big Three to keep union organizers out of Detroit and Flint.

It was the unions and the Big Three, finally reaching a mutually profitable, spit-in-your-face, don’t tread on me, partnership after years of bloody struggle that promised my father’s generation a middle class lifestyle that included health care, retirement, and a better life for their children.

It all changed. Not quickly. Not fast. We were more like those frogs in boiling water who don’t know they are cooked until they are cooked.

It only got worse after my friends and I in the Class of ‘73 started our adult lives. Manufacturing started seizing up like our parents’ lungs after too many years of Pall Mall, Lucky Strike and other fine tobacco. And just like our parents whose lungs and hearts could take no more, manufacturing collapsed. It died. The auto industry went down and dragged everything else with it.

The Great Collapse, the first ebook essay in the Restore The Roar: Manufacturing Renaissance series is available wherever ebooks are sold. For immediate download, and previews of the other essays in the series, please click here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community, the story of how the people of one community have changed the way the world sees their hometown, and the way it sees the world,  is available wherever books are sold including Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee on Monroe Center in Grand Rapids.

Last Chance Mile: the Reinvention of an American Community is also available wherever books are sold online, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and Abbott Press.
For a personally autographed hardcover or softcover edition, please click the Add To Cart Button on the Welcome Page of www.rodkackley.com.

Grand Rapids: Beer City USA, Brewers Build On Relationships

Grand  Rapids Brewers 

Use Relationships

To Become Beer City USA

By Rod Kackley

Social media helped, too

Brewers in Grand Rapids, Michigan didn’t like the feeling of a tie, so they used a well-orchestrated local social media campaign, along with an old-fashioned retail political blitzkrieg of local celebrities and politicians to claim the top prize in Brewers Association President Charlie Papazian’s annual contest.
So, Grand Rapids is Beer City USA, one year after sharing the crown with Asheville, North Carolina launched a campaign to take over first place and leave no doubt in anyone’s mind which city in the USA is really Beer City.
How did this happen? Grand Rapids is not one of the largest cities in the USA. Just because of population, it would seem that Grand Rapids should have wound up in the middle of the pack.
Lets begin with the question, what does it mean to be Beer City USA?
The president of the Brewers Association, Charlie Papazian, created the contest about five years ago through his column on the Examiner.com website.
“The craft beer community gets inundated with so many statistical facts about volume and size and how many of this and per capita of that,” he said, “and they are useful tools, but I wanted to address a little bit more fundamentally what is really going in the relationships that brewers have with beer drinkers and beer drinkers have with breweries. That was at the core of things.”
Then he asked, just what is it that makes any city, a Beer City?

The 2013 Grand Rapids campaign began when Wob Wanhatalo, the head brewer at Mitten Brewing Company in Grand Rapids and one of the founders of the Grand Rapids Society of Brewers formed an alliance with Janet Korn, the vice president of marketing at the Experience Grand Rapids Convention & Visitors Bureau, the organization that has been leading the effort to market Grand Rapids as a beer-tourism destination.
The first phase was traditional. Experience Grand Rapids created T-shirts and billboards to celebrate the 2012 Beer City USA first-place tie.
Social media was to play an important part of the 2013 Beer City USA campaign in Grand Rapids just has it has for the city’s craft brewers because it is relatively inexpensive, simple to put together and is very flexible.
“Starting up a Facebook page is kind of a useful tool for them to use as a communication vehicle,” Korn said. “It is inexpensive of course and it gives them a place where they can bring this group of people together. The platform really works for building that audience.”
The marketing strategy included content specific to the beer industry to “tell the Grand Rapids beer story from an informational perspective and included pieces of content that people could take and share,” Korn said. “I think it was the sharing among the fan base that was part of the 27,000 votes for Grand Rapids.’"
For social media platforms, they chose the Experience Grand Rapids blog, Facebook and Twitter.
However, the campaign would not rely on social media. Some very traditional point-of-purchase elements were thrown into the mix.
Experience Grand Rapids made table coasters that read, “Vote Grand Rapids Beer City USA” that were handed out at all of breweries and beer bars in Grand Rapids.
Timing was important, too.
“We didn’t want to just cram it in people’s faces so we waited until about a week or a week-and-half before the voting started and then started handing out the coasters,” said Wanhatalo.
Then feet hit the street.
A grassroots, political style campaign was the final piece of the Beer City USA effort. MiBeers.com organized three “Tap The Vote” pub crawls featuring local celebrities, Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell and other supporters who targeted the beer bars in the Grand Rapids area.
“We knew we had the breweries supporting us, so we went to all of the beer bars in town that served Grand Rapids or Michigan beer,” Wanhatalo said.
Social media still played a role. They used the hashtag#Beer City GR on Twitter during the pub crawls.
“We made sure people knew the voting was happening, and reminded them to vote, too.”
Of course, they didn’t forget the importance of beer. Wanhatalo said they decided to create some special for their customers.
The Grand Rapids brewers collaborated on four “project” beers which were brewed on a single idea or theme. The first was Beer City Pale Ale.
“The guys all pointed at me and said, ‘You come up with the recipe and we will brew it,’” said Wanhatalo.
After that they did the Grand Pumpkin beer. Brewers could do whatever they wanted for that one as long as the recipe included pumpkin.
“The way we look at it as brewers and owners is a shared celebration. We are all in this together,” Wanhatalo said. “The more cooperation, the better.”

Quenching The Thirst tells the story of how the communities of Grand Rapids and Detroit have rediscovered one of their oldest industries. For a preview, please click here.

Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how the people of Grand Rapids have changed the way the world sees their community and the way they see the world. For a preview, please click here.

Last Chance Mile autographed editions are available at Barnes & Noble Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music 28th Street and West Coast Coffee Monroe Center, Grand Rapids or by clicking the Add to Cart button on the Welcome Page of www.rodkackley.com.