U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a South Bend native, said the nation has entered a “manufacturing renaissance.” In Kokomo on Friday, he also touted job creation under President Joe Biden as part of a Midwest tour promoting Biden’s “Investing in America” platform.
“You know, there’s been a lot of talk that came to this region … over the years, but nobody in my lifetime has followed through, from Washington, D.C., the way that this administration has,” Buttigieg said.
He eschewed the region’s “Rust Belt” title, calling it a “Battery Belt” thanks to recent investments.
“The focus on American manufacturing, American-made products and American workers has characterized this administration—and delivered big results,” he said.
Buttigieg said the U.S. has added almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs under Biden’s administration, after experiencing a net loss under former President Donald Trump. That number is misleading, however, because the vast majority of those jobs were simply recovered after being lost during the pandemic. Manufacturing jobs are up only about 122,000 since January 2019.
A 2020 story from Politico detailed tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs that disappeared under the Trump administration, due in part to a combination of anti-trade policies and COVID-19 closures.
Buttigieg spoke from Ivy Tech Community College’s Kokomo campus, which he lauded for “cultivating” workers’ skills. He earlier toured Stellantis and Samsung facilities in the area, including a new electric vehicle battery manufacturing facility.
Such plants, he said, “aren’t just making batteries.”
“They are making livelihoods,” Buttigieg continued. “They represent presents under the tree. They represent education for kids. They represent cars and trucks in the driveway for so many families in this area.”
He spoke of EVs as a unifying technology.
“In the long run, electric vehicles are going to be remembered, not as some front in an invented culture war between red and blue America, but as a front in a very real global competition between the U.S. and countries like China for the future of manufacturing,” Buttigieg said. “Building EVs and the components that go into them is one of the best ways we can secure these good paying careers on American soil.”
John Hollingsworth, the superintendent for Huston Electric at the Kokomo battery plant, called the project a “tremendous opportunity” for union labor.
He’s been a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ Local 873 for over 20 years and has worked on the battery plant project for about a year and a half. The union has doubled its membership over that time, Hollingsworth said.
“For me, being part of the union is more than a job. It’s a career that has allowed me to build a better life for my family,” Hollingsworth said.
“When unions succeed, America succeeds,” he added.
The Indiana Democratic Party praised Buttigieg for “help(ing) bring billions of dollars in investment back to the Hoosier heartland” for infrastructure improvements, among other efforts.
With Vice President Kamala Harris pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, Buttigieg has frequently been included on lists of potential running mates.
Republican-aligned groups, however, critiqued his work.
“While Pete Buttigieg stops in central Indiana to discuss the disastrous Biden-Harris agenda, he is ignoring Hoosiers who are standing at the gas pump and spending over a dollar more per gallon for gas than when Biden first took office,” Josh Webb, Indiana state director at Americans for Prosperity, said in a statement.
“As Buttigieg discusses this administration’s ‘clean energy’ policy, he is overlooking the fact that the Biden Administration has ratcheted up regulations that impose additional costs on nearly every part of the oil and gas supply chain instead of working to bring oil and gas prices down,” Webb continued.
He said “Bidenomics” and inflation had left Hoosiers “worse off.”
By Leslie Bonilla Muñiz — The Indiana Capital Chronicle is an independent, not-for-profit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.
