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Feature Coverage
Longer-form reporting on plant operations, manufacturing technology, workforce strategy, and capital decisions.
The ISM manufacturing PMI for October 2026 showed production at its highest reading since November 2021, while the employment index slipped. Here's what the 6.6-point gap means for overtime, unit labor costs and the choice between a new hire and a cobot cell.
Federal rules set no minimum headcount for sponsoring a registered apprenticeship. What decides it is how many good mentors a plant has. Here is how a 100 to 1,000 person plant should choose between sponsoring its own program, joining a group sponsor or waiting.
Factories added only 9,000 jobs in September, yet August openings ran nearly 26% above a year earlier and quits rose to 197,000. A new Xometry survey ranks automation operators, quality engineers and maintenance technicians as the hardest roles to fill, and finds that pay raises work far better for large plants than for small shops.
Amazon will spend more than $100 million on a 585,000 sq ft fabrication, robotic welding and powder coating plant in Greenwood, Indiana, with 300 jobs expected by 2028. Here is what the headline pay figure means and how local shops can get ready before it opens.
Factory payrolls rose 16,000 in August, and two subsectors supplied roughly three quarters of it. The composition matters more than the headline, and so does using the right wage number: $30.37 an hour for production workers, not the $37.75 that belongs to all private employees.
Three of American manufacturing's largest bargaining tables moved inside two weeks — USW at U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, SPEEA at Boeing, and UAW at Deere. All three are governed by the same condition: ISM Production at 58.3% against an Employment Index of 51.2%. Output is rising on a shrinking headcount, and that arithmetic is what prices labor up.
Four days separated the strongest U.S. factory survey since May 2022 from a jobs report in which the entire economy shed 23,000 positions. Both readings are accurate. The reconciliation is in the workweek: at 41.7 hours versus 41.1 a year ago, factories absorbed roughly 184,000 workers' worth of additional labor input without hiring 184,000 workers.
Companies have announced roughly $1.765 trillion in U.S. factory investment since January 2025. The number that will actually govern how much of it gets built and run isn't dollars — it's the trades and technicians the country hasn't trained.
Meta's $115 million America's Workforce Academy promises free skilled-trades training and a guaranteed job to every graduate — the largest private-sector trades commitment in U.S. history. It arrives the same quarter Washington is reshaping the public pipeline that staffs everyone else's plants.
Columbia, Virginia, and AUKUS together require roughly 100,000 new skilled tradespeople over a decade. The constraint is no longer steel or shipyard floor — it is welders, pipefitters, and electricians, and the Navy is now bidding against EV battery plants and CHIPS-funded fabs for the same applicants.
The Pentagon's May 8 expansion of Purdue's SCALE program to a $100M ceiling through FY2027 — more than five times its 2020 baseline — reframes the Department of Defense as a structural funder, not just a customer, of America's semiconductor labor supply.
Eli Lilly's four new U.S. drug plants and a doubled Lebanon, Indiana site need thousands of cGMP-trained process engineers — the same scarce talent that Dow Freeport and Eastman Kingsport rely on to run American specialty chemicals.