With the darkest days of the pandemic behind us, government and private industry continue to grapple with the fallout from public policies and workplace rules that furloughed a large swath of employees, stunted academic aptitude, and exposed the nation’s dependence on overseas manufacturing long exported away from the United States. While COVID-19 surely brought this production gap in goods ranging from microchips to pharmaceuticals center stage, selected countries around the globe have been faster to respond to this decades-long shift in manufacturing to the lowest cost producers, many of whom reside in Asia. While the progress at home has been slow, a few states have acted early and invested in technical training initiatives that often include highly subsidized or free vocational school education to bridge what many expect to be a growing divide between the supply and demand for labor to fuel a potential manufacturing renaissance in the United States.
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