Choose the Right Road

“O I’ll tak’ the high road and ye’ll tak’ the low road, An’ I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.”

– from Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond

You’d think it would be impossible, nowadays, to get lost. Maps and directions, even detailed aerial photos, are a mouse-click away. Your own personal global positioning system, available in bracelet form, can tell you precisely where you are at any time. Even rental cars come with talking microprocessors that nag you in the right direction. But I managed, while on vacation last week, to cross the same intersection four times looking for a certain restaurant. You always know you’re in trouble when somebody tells you, “Y’ can’t miss it…” So, despite expert advice, obvious signs, and conventional wisdom, you can still lose your way.

There’s a lesson here, I’ve concluded, that applies to the future of U.S. manufacturing. We face a choice of roads, a choice that risks losing more than a few minutes of driving time. If we pick the wrong road, we will change, for the worse, the quality and nature of the society we claim to cherish.

Is the Low Road inevitable?

Ever so gradually, it’s becoming “common knowledge” that manufacturing in this country is destined to disappear. Somehow, in its stead, “knowledge management” will trump “making things,” and a new order will emerge. It’s been called the “techno-service economy.” The more cynical see it as the “burger-flipper” society. No matter. The point is that, over time, we’ve started to accept the notion that the de-industrialization of our economy is inevitable. Y’ can’t miss it.

Hold it. It doesn’t take an expert in macro-economics to see where this is headed. The Low Road of the past 25 years, emphasizing quarterly vision and large short-term returns regardless of impact, has consistently threatened to destroy the productive capacity that makes a healthy economy possible. Its methods include ignoring reinvestment, lowering wages, weakening organization, and promoting destructive competition.

We have seen manufacturing move away on a massive scale. Without jobs, people began to lose the skills essential for work. Historically, an industry’s structure supported the passing of skills and knowledge from generation to generation. Take away that learning cycle, critical information necessary for rebuilding the local economy is lost. As income declines, so do tax revenues and the local infrastructure supported by public dollars-education in particular. The Low Road spirals downward, and the cycle repeats.

Taking the High Road together

Thankfully, there is another road to take. And an increasing number of business-labor-community-government alliances are exploring and choosing High Road manufacturing. According to the Center for Labor and Community Research: “The High Road seeks the highest and best use of our human and material resources, and is made possible by values that seek the broadest distribution of wealth and human development as an objective of the economy.”1

The High Road requires a creative partnership between labor and management, which neither typically thinks of. Both play a leading role, engaged with community and government leaders, developing manufacturing policy and strategy that is economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.

Utopian? Anything worth doing that’s bigger than our own self- interest, that calls us out of our guarded camps to act boldly together can be easily dismissed with the word. But, as Saul Alinsky once said, “Any progress must be conceived of in utopian terms in order to marshal the enormous energy needed to move a few feet forward.”

Arguing whether off-shoring certain kinds of jobs, for example, is good or bad misses the more important question: what kind of society do we want, and what kinds of industries must we retain and create to sustain that society? I’ve heard it said, “Whoever controls the definition, controls the outcome.” Once we accept the Low Road definition, we accept the Low Road outcome: an “hour-glass society” that is unsustainable. We should, instead, be arguing about how we can best take the High Road together. We have a choice between the Low Road and the High Road, and it’s not just getting to Scotland that’s at stake. It’s our common future.

1 “Building a Bridge to the High Road,” Center for Labor and Community Research, www.clcr.org

GEORGE GATES is President of Core-R.O.I. Inc.

Copyright Paperloop, Inc. Aug 2005