A new report released by the Dayton Region Manufacturers Association offers — for the most part — a positive look back at the area's manufacturing industry over the last year.
WYSO’s Jerry Kenney spoke with DRMA President Angelia Erbaugh, who said the report indicates “The industry is trending up in terms of number of employees, job openings, and positive economic development."
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Angelia Erbaugh: The bottom-line challenge is the demographics. We just don't have enough people, period. And so therefore, all industries are fighting for those same people. And so we just have to make sure that we have our game and make sure that we're in the fray to get our industry in front of students and educators. We learn that that was the first thing we learned about 15 years ago was that if we can bring an educator into a manufacturing facility and watch them react, 'Holy moly, had no idea,' then they can go back and talk to students.
So we got to get that message in front of educators too. Is that a solution that's going to solve the problem in the next year? Absolutely not. And we always say, you know ‘Man, I wish we could measure the effectiveness of these efforts,' but we certainly know that if we do nothing, we know what we're going to get. And so we do believe that getting in front of students to talk about careers in manufacturing, getting them inside manufacturing facilities is not a bad thing.
Jerry Kenney: This challenge is something that could certainly affect the good news I understand that is in the latest report for manufacturing in the area. Can you talk about the current state of affairs?
Erbaugh: Yes. The workforce thing, it's good news and bad news. We use the Dayton Development Coalition to gather data for us. So their official area is 12 counties. We add on two other counties to that geography,, because we have so many members in Butler and Warren County. And so our data is based on the 14-county area surrounding Dayton. The number of companies went up slightly compared to last year. The number of job openings, monthly job openings went up 250 a month, average job openings. So it went from a 1,500 a month to 1,763.
So that kind of is the bad news. The good news is that we're a very viable industry. Because one perception that I think we finally got over about 15 years ago was that, with GM leaving the Dayton region, there is no manufacturing left. And that's really what spurred this data gathering so that we can put this in front of people. No, no, no. It's a huge industry made up of small businesses. It's not the GMs of the world.
The good news is that we have more companies, we have more job openings. And the bad news is that we're struggling to fill those job openings. Another piece of good news is that the average earnings of all manufacturing jobs, including management and for workers, the average is $86,745 a year. That went up by 3,500 over last year. Last year it was 83,000. So that's great news. And then the percentage the number of employees went up by about 500 total number of employees. The percentage of our region's workforce employed by manufacturing went down half a point. Total payroll of the region, the percentage of payroll for the region went down by 2/10ths. But the amount of payroll went up by close to $1 billion. So it's all good news. We had mid-investments in the region went up by $1 billion, meaning 61 facilities were expanded, 13 facilities were constructed and created just over 10,000 jobs. So all that is good news.
The other good news about the Dayton region's manufacturing industry is that unlike other manufacturing clusters across the state, across the country, our manufacturers serve diverse markets. We're not highly focused in a certain market like you think of Warsaw, Indiana, with medical device manufacturing. We do everything. I explain to non-manufacturing people that a lot of our manufacturers are what we call contract manufacturers. And what that means is that they're really good at a specialty or a set of specialties, capabilities. And what that means is that they can serve their customers who might be in different sectors. If I'm really good at micro-machining, I might do that for medical device manufacturers. I might do that for the nuclear industry, the defense industry. And I think that is actually one of the reasons why our industry was not decimated during the Covid years, because almost every single one of our members and manufacturing in general was in that essential supply chain in one form or another, because they have such a diverse market of manufacturers they serve. So that's very good news for our manufacturing industry.
And we're one stop shop. You need something made, that can be made here in the Dayton region in a very short turnaround, from raw material supplies, to the actual design and manufacture of a product. Every product starts with 'tool' and so we have the expertise, the talent and the companies and the equipment to make the tooling this required for everything. It's been fractured. We can make the. We can get a heat treated and freeze dried and all of those ancillary services and out the door where a lot of other manufacturing communities [dont], the Dayton region has it all. So we say manufacturing here is definitely a one stop shop.
Kenney: So those positive data points. Can you pinpoint any other directions your agency is taking outside of workforce development to keep those positive data points trending in the right direction?
Erbaugh: I'm not sure exactly answers your question, but another survey that we do of our of our members, of our manufacturers each year is basically asking them 'what's on their mind? What's keeping them awake tonight, right now? And that skilled workforce is the number one. They're increasingly concerned about the overall increase in costs of doing business. That's not a surprise to you. Up this year compared to last year is their concern about economic factors. You know, are we, in fact, headed toward a recession? You know, just what's going on there? And they kind of think of that as kind of a near-term concern. Long term concern, then, is how those all those things affect their business, sustainability and growth.
These are sophisticated businesspeople. Even the 5- or 10-person shop, they understand that they have to be good businesspeople in order to sustain their business. And so they're concerned about reasonable levels of regulation. We want our workers and our citizens to be safe, but we don't want unneeded regulations that just makes it harder and more costly to stay in this business. They're always concerns about the tax rate and the complicated tax code. You know, it's always a concern. And then this year, what hit the list was international trade and global competition. And basically what they're saying is that, you know, we just want a level playing field, you know, so that we can compete, don’t put up barriers that makes it impossible for us to compete in a global economy. One good news on their concerns is that what went down since the last couple of years is they're no longer overly concerned about constraints in the supply chain. So that has kind of fixed itself. They're good about.
