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Dayton
Business Journal...
Manufacturers
hopeful Obama plan will
create jobs
by Malia Spencer
Saturday, June 25, 2011
President
Barack Obama offered his
vision on what it will take to reinvigorate American manufacturing at a
speech
Friday at a Carnegie Mellon University robotics lab. in Pittsburgh.
Sitting
in the audience, Georgia
Berner, CEO of Berner International , said she hoped Obama’s remarks
would help
to propel the industry into the future and ensure that manufacturing
remains
cutting edge.
“It
was outstanding,” Berner said
after the president’s remarks at the National Robotics Engineering
Center. “He
has the language he needed to have.”
Specifically,
it highlights the
importance of manufacturing to building the middle class, she said, and
it
articulates a path for small manufacturers to also benefit.
“It’s
been difficult to negotiate the
paths and I hope this makes it easier to get access,” she said of the
initiative’s plan to foster technological collaboration between the
nation’s
large multinational companies and smaller companies. “The small
manufacturer is
often not on the agenda.”
Berner’s
company, which manufacturers
air curtains and energy recovery equipment, has been in business since
1956 and
employs 65 people.
Obama
spoke about the need for
American manufacturing to stay competitive in the world, and how his
new
Advanced Manufacturing Partnership would do that.
Several
top business and education
leaders attended, including John Surma, chairman, president and CEO of
United
States Steel Corp. (NYSE: X), and Andrew Moore, engineering director of
Pittsburgh’s Google office (Nasdaq: GOOG) office.
The
partnership invests $500 million
through existing programs and includes some existing funding plus some
appropriations pending before Congress, said Ron Bloom, assistant to
the
president for manufacturing policy.
Read
the rest of the story with links
at Dayton Business Journal
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