California Congressman Mike Honda Discusses American Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

Recently, I was invited to cover Congressman Mike Honda’s visit to Hunter Technology Corp, in Santa Clara, CA, which was arranged through the IPC’s “Meet the Policymakers” program. The Congressman spent several hours touring the facility, meeting the employees of Hunter Technology, and answering their questions.

After the tour, I sat down with Congressman Honda, who represents District 17 in the Silicon Valley, and talked with him about American manufacturing, infrastructure, education and some of the current thinking in America.

I also invited IPC Vice President of Governmental Relations, John Hasselmann, and Joe O’Neil, president of Hunter Technology, to share a few thoughts about the program.

John Hasselmann, Vice President of Government Relations, IPC^[1]:

“IPC places a high priority on government relations because it is directly related to helping its members thrive in a global marketplace. IPC advocates for policy initiatives that promote innovation and advanced manufacturing and provide broad-based economic growth and competitiveness.

“One of IPC’s advocacy strategies is to cultivate relationships between IPC members and their elected officials. IPC does this through its “Meet the Policymakers” program, in which IPC government relations staff arranges opportunities for IPC members to host elected officials at company locations. This program provides the opportunity for elected officials to hear how the policies they are considering will help or harm businesses and their employees in their states and districts. In 2014, IPC coordinated the visits of 12 members of Congress to IPC member companies all across the country.

“Congressman Mike Honda’s recent visit to IPC-member Hunter Technology Corp. in California was one of these scheduled visits and part of a nationwide effort to educate policymakers on legislative and regulatory issues that affect the electronics manufacturing industry.”

More information about IPC’s government relations efforts can be found here.

Joe O’Neil, President, Hunter Technology:

“I’ve worked with Congressman Honda and his staff, both in his district office and in Washington D.C., for nearly 10 years now. I sincerely appreciate his support of business in the Silicon Valley, most recently through his backing of the Revitalize American Manufacturing Innovation (RAMI) Act^[2].

“The greatest impact that I observed during Congressman Honda’s visit to Hunter was with our employees. Congressman Honda took time with a number of employees throughout the factory to learn who they are, what they do for Hunter and how they go about their jobs. This was an outstanding opportunity for citizens to connect with their elected representatives within their daily environment. This interaction helped demonstrate that representatives are indeed normal people, people who are working to make everyone’s lives better. I believe events like this help to create ties to the political process which can at times be viewed as out of reach to the average citizen.

Competing on a global scale within the United States has its challenges and having those challenges understood by our Representatives is critical. As we continue to expand by hiring new employees and developing those which are already on our team, it is important that the impact of tax changes, insurance costs, research and development tax credits as well as hundreds of other decisions being made in Washington that directly effect on those hiring decisions is fully recognized.

The Interview

Barry Matties: I've been in publishing in this industry for 30 years. I started here in the Bay Area with my Mac Plus, with no hard drive, and began a desktop publishing company.

Congressman Mike Honda: I remember those days. But you saw the future!​​​​​​​

Matties: That's really what we have to pay attention to. We’re all living in the moment, but we have to plan for tomorrow. Seeing you here at a manufacturing facility, it’s been great listening to the questions you’ve been asking. I’m just curious what you thought of the tour? What is your takeaway from Hunter Technologies?

Honda: I have a couple impressions, and one is that it is well thought out and systematic. It’s providing a way for end-users to not worry about inventory, because I think the thing that kills a lot of companies is that overabundance of inventory. But this provides the on-time, real-time and immediate production of the pieces that people need in order to keep producing their products. Also, the job of the workforce here is pretty diversified. I asked a question earlier about the necessary educational level. They said that they basically train everybody at the get-go, and that’s something that community colleges can start looking at to come in and help these kinds of companies to provide that kind of education, too.

Then there are the guys here wearing the blue jackets—the engineers—who probably help a lot of clients by having their eyes and ears on site and with the overall quality control or quality assurance process. Those are the kind of things that if you don’t ask the questions you just think, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of activity here.’ But you don’t really know what function each person has. If you ask the questions you start to understand that it’s almost like a marketplace.

Matties: One of the things you mentioned when a large team of Hunter’s employees were here was that the labor cost offshore may not be as appealing anymore. When I look at a country like China it seems they have a national strategy for manufacturing. And when we look to America, do you think we have that kind of national strategy in mind?

Honda: No, I don’t think there is a national strategy—there’s a national call for an initiative and President Obama has said that. That’s why we wrote a couple bills like the America COMPETES Act and a couple things that were related to STEM education.

Matties: I did notice the information about STEM education on your website.

Honda: Right, I try to refocus everybody’s activities in STEM for two reasons: One is to add an A and call it STEAM, because you need the arts. We need to pay attention to the arts because through arts you can teach science, technology, engineering and math. Because when you do a lot of these things there’s an arts aspect embedded in all of them. Arts usually are the place where all these things come together anyway. Whether it’s composition of music or the creation of a building through architecture, the arts is where this all has to come together. The second thing is focusing not on fifth or sixth grade for starting with STEM. They say we need more minorities and women or more youngsters from the poor communities. But you can’t start in the fifth grade; you should start with preschool, and as a teacher I know that we can teach youngsters these things at that younger level.

We can teach them that the things they do every day at home, with their parents or in the garage, have scientific implications. But we don’t translate their daily lives into scientific terminologies for a lot of these kids. Kids who grow up in Cupertino with parents who are astrophysicists or computer engineers hear these terminologies all the time, so there’s a very little jump for them when they go to school. For youngsters who don’t have that environment it’s not through lack of desire, but a lack of preparation. But it doesn’t mean that these kids cannot learn. So paying attention to that as a teacher and as a community we can give them that head start and give them the extra things that other children have available to them.

Matties: That leads me to my next thought. I’m wondering what you think could be done to improve our current infrastructure to help support businesses become more competitive in the world. It could be transportation, Internet, etc. What should we be focusing on in terms of improving it?

Honda: In Congress, ever since I've been there [2001], a lot of the leadership under Bush started to actively collect monies in areas of research and we had to keep fighting them. So I used earmarks to supplement the lack of funds in those areas. Then, we got rid of earmarks, so we had to get real creative in finding other ways to fund some of the projects that we cared about. I sat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with Ray LaHood and Jim Oberstar, and Oberstar always tried to increase the funding for the trust funds so that we could get monies from sales of gas in order to build bridges, maintain freeways, etc.Page 1 of 2

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