California Congressman Mike Honda Discusses American Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

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 3 of 7

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