🔒Sen. Murphy: Build Back Better, infrastructure bills will be boon to CT manufacturing

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has gained national notoriety in recent years, particularly on the issue of national security.

But Connecticut’s junior senator has always promoted manufacturing as one of his top issues. It makes sense politically, considering 19% of the state’s manufacturing workforce resides in his 5th Congressional district, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Murphy has made it a point to promote various manufacturers around the state doing innovative work. In October, for example, he visited Chester’s Chapco Inc., which is manufacturing UV disinfection equipment being developed by Avon-based iCleanse. He also visited Oxford-based JuiceBar, which is a developer of electric vehicle charging stations.

Murphy, who has also been a proponent of strengthening the federal government’s Buy American laws, said the country’s ability to compete globally will depend on the strength of manufacturing.

“I know the American economy will die if we aren’t making things here,” he said in a recent interview. “I don’t think you can be a service sector and technology economy only. My belief is that we can’t win a contest with China over the next 50 years if we give up on manufacturing. Connecticut may have a reputation of being a financial services state but we have a greater share of our economy dedicated to manufacturing than the national average.”

Murphy recently talked with the Hartford Business Journal about two key pieces of federal legislation — the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better agenda and $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — that have been hotly debated in Washington, D.C.

Congress recently approved the infrastructure bill, which will send an estimated $6 billion to Connecticut for road and bridge repairs and investments in rail, expanded internet access and electric vehicle charging stations.

Murphy discussed what both bills would mean for the state’s manufacturing industry and workforce development efforts.

Here’s what he had to say:

Q: What’s in the Build Back Better and infrastructure bills for manufacturing, small businesses and workforce development programs?

Those pieces of legislation will be transformative for the country’s economy and Connecticut’s economy.

The Build Back Better Act has $40 billion for workforce development. We know our primary obstacle to manufacturing growth in Connecticut is lack of workforce, especially as we start to ramp up defense production at Electric Boat.

This bill is going to have significant new funding to expand workforce training programs and we will use a lot of that money in Connecticut for advanced and defense manufacturing.

Second, the bill has big money for renewable energy and clean energy manufacturing. Connecticut is going to be a place where a lot of wind turbine energy technology is going to be produced due to the development of wind energy off Long Island Sound. This bill will help those companies scale up in Connecticut.

And lastly, the bipartisan infrastructure bill has a historic amount of money for roads, rail and grid improvements. People bring businesses to Connecticut only if they believe they can get the goods out of Connecticut and to major ports easily. The clogged nature of I-84 and I-95 hurt the state so we are going to be able to dramatically unclog our roadways and rail lines with these infrastructure dollars.

Q: Do you have a sense of how much of that workforce development funding will come to the state and what kind of programs will they fund?

We always expect to get about 1% of the dollars of any new program. That’s a significant amount of money, nearly $1 billion in workforce development funding coming to Connecticut.

In that bill there is funding for an expansion of apprenticeship programs. There are specific programs for workers who have been laid off and out of the workforce for a long period of time. There are new dollars for jobs dedicated to climate adaptation, and that describes every project happening along Long Island Sound, including a lot of the development occurring in New London.

Q: You mentioned funding for renewables and wind energy. What kind of opportunities are there for Connecticut manufacturers?

We have a pretty big renewable energy footprint in the state and it’s growing. There are going to be major tax incentives in this bill for the manufacturing and purchase of renewable energy products.

We will have funding in this bill for fuel cell technology, where Connecticut is an unquestioned leader. And there will be more money in this bill for residential and commercial build-out of solar and wind power, which creates jobs in manufacturing and the installation sector.

Q: Why do you think manufacturers have faced a long-term workforce shortage? After all, this issue predates the pandemic.

In Connecticut you can’t decouple the workforce shortage from the housing shortage. We have an issue of affordable housing in the state and when I say affordable housing I don’t mean subsidized housing, I just mean houses that you can afford if you are making $50,000.

The Build Back Better agenda has $100 billion to build 1 million new units of affordable housing and affordable single-family houses in the country.

That scratches us where we itch in Connecticut. We can build all the workforce training programs we want, but if you can’t afford to buy a house on a $50,000 salary then we are going to have a hard time growing manufacturing jobs, when starter houses are easy to find in Texas, Alabama and North Carolina, so that housing investment will be really critical.

But there are other pieces in the Build Back Better agenda that will help with the workforce. We need to get more women back into the workforce. It’s been mostly women who have left the workforce during the pandemic and we definitely need to get women into manufacturing.

Building out universal pre-K and dramatically cutting the cost of child care will allow more women to get into industries like manufacturing.

Q: You’ve visited a lot of manufacturers over the years. What’s your sense of their biggest challenges? What about opportunities?

We are going to continue to be a manufacturing economy dominated by aerospace. While we’ve had a temporary slowdown in the aerospace industry, that won’t be permanent. So we need to continue to see our strength in both the renewable energy and aerospace manufacturing sectors.

The aerospace manufacturing sector benefits from strong Buy American policies and we continue to make gains in enforcing existing Buy American policy and passing new policies.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill has included in it my BuyAmerican.gov Act. That’s a bill that sets up a clearinghouse so every manufacturer in the country sees when the federal government is trying to obtain a waiver to the Buy American law. That will help a lot of smaller manufacturers in Connecticut compete for federal contracts.

Q: You’ve been a leading proponent of fixing our Buy American laws. What’s wrong with them and how should we change them?

A lot of the issue with Buy American is that multiple administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have not enforced the law.

So, we are working with the Biden administration to try to get them to be more serious to require that defense work be done in the United States. We also need programs that keep small manufacturers in business, especially when they are the last maker of a particular good in the United States.

We’ve been able to get funding recently in appropriations bills that would provide some grant funding to smaller companies that are the last maker of a particular important product for federal agencies.

Q: We are having major supply chain issues in the U.S. Is there a solution out there to this problem?

I think this is a complicated and temporary problem connected to a global economy that slowed down to a crawl and is very quickly ramping back up to a run.

The United States isn’t the only country experiencing a workforce shortage right now, so many goods are coming out very slowly because [other countries] are also having trouble getting people back to work. I think the supply chain crunch is temporary.

Q: Do you think the supply chain issues experienced during the pandemic will lead to a reshoring trend among manufacturers, and what can Congress do to incentivize reshoring?

I think we’ve seen the reshoring phenomenon at work for the last five years and as the price of making goods in China continues to increase and the cost of transportation becomes more volatile, it makes a lot more sense to make goods here at home.

We also have finally come to the conclusion that it’s a national security problem to have such an international supply chain, especially when it comes to medical equipment. I think Congress will be mandating we have a stronger domestic supply chain so we never again are stuck relying on surgical masks and syringes being made on the other side of the world.

This is a good time to be going into manufacturing because there is a lot of reshoring happening for competitive and strategic reasons.

We just passed in the Senate legislation that creates a new fund for semiconductors to be made in the United States. That is a landmark piece of legislation to protect the existing semiconductor industry and reshore jobs back to the U.S.

Our infrastructure is a liability when it comes to reshoring. Part of the reason manufacturers are reluctant to bring back work to the United States is because they don’t think they can get their goods to the international market as quickly as opposed to making things in China.

So, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which invests money in not only roads and bridges but also port infrastructure, is a big part of our plan to encourage reshoring.

Q: What other ways can we make Connecticut manufacturing more competitive to prevent work from going down south and overseas?

We need to understand what role we are going to fill in the manufacturing economy.

Connecticut is not always going to be the place that makes the cheapest goods. It’s going to be the place that makes the more advanced products.

Given the fact that our labor prices are higher, we also benefit from more technological input into manufacturing. A lot of people see machines as a threat to job creation but in Connecticut, as robotics start to take over manufacturing floors, that actually makes us more competitive with other parts of the country because that machine costs the same to install in Connecticut as it does in Florida, but in Connecticut our education system is better, our public safety is better.

We need to make sure state policy incentivizes the purchase of manufacturing technology.