🔒State’s disparate manufacturing groups join forces to strengthen lobbying effort in Hartford

When Gov. Ned Lamont hired former Whitcraft Group CEO Colin Cooper as the state’s first-ever chief manufacturing officer last October, Connecticut producers largely cheered his pick, and the creation of the CMO position.

But the move also marked a major victory for a nascent trade group — the Connecticut Manufacturers’ Collaborative (CMC) — comprised of nine state manufacturing industry associations. In a year since its founding, CMC had enough influence to convince the Lamont administration to create a cabinet-level position dedicated wholly to the manufacturing industry.

The group’s early impact has shown the state’s diverse manufacturing industry can work together effectively to shape public policy, which hasn’t always been the case.

With dozens of associations representing manufacturers in different geographical regions and sectors (i.e. medical-device makers vs. aerospace producers), the industry hasn’t always been able to advocate for a coordinated or coherent policy agenda that benefits the industry as a whole, said Bonnie Del Conte, CEO of manufacturing consulting firm CONNSTEP, which is a CMC member and a subsidiary of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA).

“What if we took the major manufacturing associations that are in Connecticut, got the directors and presidents of those associations together and said we can represent all manufacturers across the state?” Del Conte recalled of early conversations in forming CMC. “We said we would have a good representation for the whole state to speak in one voice.”

Connecticut’s manufacturing industry was hardly lacking in representation in state government before CMC was established. In 2014, for example, the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) established a $75-million Manufacturing Innovation Fund, and that was two years after state lawmakers formed a bipartisan Manufacturing Caucus, which focuses on legislation that could affect the industry.

What changed with CMC’s arrival was the ability to speak in a unified voice, said Eric Brown, CBIA’s vice president of manufacturing policy and a CMC architect. Rather than regional manufacturing associations pushing disparate policies specific to their area, the CMC can now advocate for legislation beneficial to manufacturers statewide with the implied backing of businesses under CMC’s umbrella.

And as a new legislative session is set to begin next month, CMC will continue using that clout to defend programs key to the manufacturing sector’s advancement from possible budget cuts, Brown said.

It’s also working with the governor’s office, DECD and new workforce council to shape a strategic plan for the industry as it battles numerous challenges including a major workforce shortage and high costs of doing business.

“That’s why we call our group a ‘collaborative,’ we want to collaborate not just internally with ourselves, we want to collaborate with all the different stakeholders in the state that are working to help improve manufacturing,” Brown said.

Too many cooks

CMC is the most successful effort to effectively organize the state’s manufacturing industry into a single lobbying group, but it’s not the first.

About a decade ago, CONNSTEP, which was independent at the time, worked with the CBIA and New Haven Manufacturers Association (NHMA) to form the Connecticut Manufacturing Coalition, a statewide industry group, Del Conte said. But that group was too unwieldy to be effective, as members included individual manufacturers and smaller interest groups.

“It got big very quickly because we did not limit it just to the manufacturing associations like we did this time around [with CMC],” Del Conte said, noting the difficulties in hearing out and acting on so many different priorities. “It was just too big.”

With nine groups representing a collective interest, CMC is able to look at which issues are affecting most companies and regions and prioritize accordingly, she said.

The need to establish a coherent policy agenda has also never been more important as the industry faces significant headwinds, even as parts of it — particularly defense companies — are in a major growth spurt.

The industry expects a raft of retirements in coming years without enough new workers to fill those positions.

According to a CBIA/CONNSTEP survey conducted last year of more than 350 Connecticut manufacturers, 19 percent of the state’s manufacturing workers are set to retire between 2021 and 2024.

Meanwhile, 60 percent of survey respondents ranked recruitment, retention and hiring qualified staff as their most immediate significant need, the survey found.

The prospect of an industry-wide workforce crisis seems to loom large in state manufacturing associations’ desire to make CMC work, said Jamison Scott, executive director of the New Haven Manufacturers Association, which is a CMC member.

“I think the bottom line is the stars have aligned,” Scott said. “We’ve really come together with the CMC to say that we have a lot of mutual interests … , there are growing workforce needs, there’s growing collaboration among the [manufacturing] organizations.”

2020 agenda

State Sen. Joan Hartley (D-Waterbury), co-chair of the General Assembly’s Manufacturing Caucus, said she thinks having a unified policy agenda will help the industry get better results at the state Capitol.

When the caucus formed under the auspices of the Commerce Committee in 2012, gauging what specific actions the legislature could take to support an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of their constituents wasn’t necessarily a simple task, Hartley said.

“Previous to [CMC’s] existence, we were dealing with manufacturing organizations from across the state,” Hartley said. “They were not speaking in one voice, so in that respect, their message was somewhat fractured.”

Additionally, Brown’s heavy involvement as the face of CMC lends credence to the organization, Hartley said, as he is a known commodity as CBIA’s manufacturing specialist, and is widely respected in both manufacturing and political circles.

That trust factor is important because lawmakers have tried programs backed by the industry that weren’t effective, wasting taxpayer dollars.

One program that allowed job-seekers to receive credentials in mobile classrooms was scrapped after two years because it wasn’t living up to lawmakers’ expectations, Hartley said.

During the upcoming legislative session, Brown said CMC’s focus will be on avoiding cuts to programs currently benefiting manufacturers, including the incumbent worker training, manufacturing voucher and apprenticeship programs.

The Manufacturing Innovation Fund is down to about $8 million, Brown said, and CMC wants short-term bonding to fund it through the 2021 fiscal year, and a long-term model to sustain the fund beyond that.

In any event, Brown said, he learned from the group’s first year in operation that the key to CMC’s success will likely lie in being judicious with the proposals it promotes, and sticking to issues that have the broadest impact on manufacturers across the state.

“What was really critical, we found, was that the legislature just by its nature is going to want to know, ‘what’s the one thing [you need]?’ ” he said. “If you can only have one thing, what’s the most important thing? We’ll try and do two or three things, but we need to know … what is the No. 1 thing?”