Feature Coverage

Manufacturing features and analysis

Longer-form reporting on plant operations, manufacturing technology, workforce strategy, and capital decisions.

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Workforce DevelopmentAugust 11, 2026

The Factory Boom That Isn't Hiring: ISM Hits 55.6 — a Four-Year High — and Payrolls Added Just 5,000 Manufacturing Jobs

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.

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Workforce DevelopmentJuly 13, 2026

$1.765 Trillion Pledged, Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs Empty: The Reshoring Boom's Binding Constraint Was Never Capital

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.

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Workforce DevelopmentJuly 7, 2026

Meta Just Made the Biggest Private Bet on the Trades — as Washington's Own Workforce Money Wobbles the Same Month

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.

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Workforce DevelopmentMay 27, 2026

The U.S. Navy's Submarine Industrial Base Is Now Hiring Faster Than the Auto Industry — and That's the Bottleneck

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.

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Workforce DevelopmentMay 13, 2026

DoD Pushes SCALE Microelectronics Workforce Contract to $100M — Pentagon Quietly Becomes a Primary Funder of the U.S. Fab Labor Pipeline

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.

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Workforce DevelopmentMay 7, 2026

Lilly's $27 Billion API Buildout Hits a Process-Engineer Wall — and Specialty Chemicals Is Fighting to Hold Its Bench

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.

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