By Rhonda B. Graham
Jul. 14, 2013

Thirteen years ago when Donna and Frank Masley ended years of trying to build a business in their basement, who knew their hard work and personal sweat equity would one day make them symbolic of a much-needed revival in “Made in America” products?

Yet on Thursday, the couple symbolized Congressman John Carney’s preoccupation with returning this country to an era when American manufacturing thrived worldwide due to the mastery of the American worker’s skill. On Capitol Hill, with Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Carney introduced House Resolution 2664, the Made in America Act.

“We need to make things in America again,” Carney told a crowd gathered at Masley Enterprises, Inc., which supplies the American military with specialty gloves that are 100 percent made in this country. It is one of a few glove companies in the nation that designs and manufactures gloves for the nation’s troops at its East Side Wilmington location on 16th and Jessup streets which opened in 2008.

The legislation would create the “America Star Program,” with a voluntary, standardized label that helps consumers easily identify which products are essentially “home-grown.” It’s no secret the U.S. has long been off the list of preferable products essential to Americans’ daily lives. Besides, only the truly virtuous among us can be trusted to admit we harbor no ill will at the hut for clothing and products without tagging that says “Made in China, Korea, India, Singapore, Brazil, Thailand ...”

And partly that’s our own fault. During the past three decades U.S. political and business leaders misjudged the limits of our reputation as a world leader when it comes to being continually innovative in marketing and production skills and competitive pricing. Many people in and out of Congress fault the North American Treaty Alliance on President Bill Clinton’s administration’s watch.

At the same time, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has put his country of more than a billion residents on alert, with essentially a message that is best framed as: “Look, our exports and import markets are imploding. We’ve got to do something real quick if we are to remain the giant of economic innovation and dominance for the world.”

CNN.com Money confirms the Chinese tremors in their confidence of their country as a sustainable economic world leader. “Weaker manufacturing. A credit crunch and sky-high interest rates” headlined a story last week.

But Harvard University experts told Carney recently our education system is equally to blame. In an era where a bachelor’s degree has the status of a high school diploma and the American student ranks near the bottom of most international comparisons for math and science proficiency – selling Made in America as a way out of our fiscal deficit requires rethinking the fundamentals of our education policy.

And they insist we need more support for small businesses, a recognized engine to refuel a sluggish jobs economy. Among them are programs like the Underutilized Business Zones (HUBZone), in urban and rural communities that made Masley Enterprises eligible for preferential access to federal procurement opportunities courtesy of the Small Business Association.

And yet when the company first needed to expand, Frank Masley said he was urged to avoid Wilmington’s East Side and instead relocate to rural Delaware or even consider overseas manufacturing opportunities.

As City Councilman Darius Brown suggested during Carney’s Friday press conference, if there is to be a true rebirth of Made in America enterprise, why not begin it in his Third District, the birthplace of the First State, where the Swedes and Finns settled in 1638.

Congressman Carney points to another trend over the past several years – “insourcing” – a return to American shores by major employers once welcomed overseas for shifting their business to lower-wage workers. General Electric is among those returning its work to the U.S. and specifically to its Delaware site. For that loyalty, the company suitably being rewarded with tax- and wage-related incentives.

It can’t be ignored that some might see the successful passage of the Made in America Act as an unreasoned fear of things made foreign. That’s not entirely untrue. It’s scary to know our country’s largest debts are owed to those who used their ingenuity to improve on and rebrand American-made products as their own conceptions – often by stealing our intellectual property and violating goodwill trade agreements.

Bipartisan passage of the Made in America Act in Congress would be a fitting response. Along the lines of what Henry Ford observed about the value of wasted lost opportunities, this bill can help us replace our failure of taking the eye off the ball of key economic forces as an “opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”