New Year’s Resolutions for Manufacturers

New Year’s resolutions. We make them every year. Sometimes we achieve them; sometimes we don’t.

This past year, for example, I resolved to stop cursing. I’ve mostly done a good job of that, though my wife and dog might beg to differ.

Be that as it may, we offer the following New Year’s resolutions for manufacturers.

Improve workplace safety. Manufacturers have made great strides here, but there’s always room for improvement. Over the summer, for example, a worker at the Jeep assembly plant in Toledo, OH, was fatally injured when he became caught under a vehicle moving on the assembly line. A subsequent inspection revealed the conveyor lacked proper guarding at pinch points where employees could be caught between moving parts.

There’s no excuse for that in this day and age. So take a look around your facility, ask the “what if” questions, and be proactive about safety.

Upskill the workforce. “Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” essayist Charles Dudley Warner famously quipped.

The same might be said for the skilled labor shortage. The surest way to create a skilled labor force is train your own. And yet, I’ve often heard manufacturing executives express reluctance to invest in training out of fear that they would merely be training workers for their competition.

In addition, when times are tough, training is often considered an expendable line item. Indeed, according to a survey conducted by industry publication Training magazine, U.S. businesses spent nearly 4 percent less on training in 2024 than they did in 2023. On average, employees received 47 hours of training in 2024 vs. 57 hours in 2023.

That’s too bad, because statistics overwhelmingly favor the benefits of training. Companies with comprehensive employee training programs have 218 percent higher income per employee than companies without formalized training. When employees receive the training they need (and want), companies are 17 percent more productive. Some 45 percent of workers are more likely to stay in their role if they receive training, and more than 90 percent of employees say they won’t quit if they get development opportunities.

Share the wealth. A popular topic of conversation at the holiday dinner table in my extended family is the jaw-dropping salaries of professional athletes. “Why should anyone be paid $765 million for hitting a baseball?” bemoans my niece, the elementary school teacher.

A fair point. No one, however, bats an eye at the money being paid to the suits in the corner offices. The typical compensation package for chief executives who run companies in the S&P 500 jumped nearly 13 percent in 2023, easily surpassing the gains for workers at a time when inflation was putting considerable pressure on Americans’ budgets.

The median pay package for CEOs rose to $16.3 million, up 12.6 percent, according to data analyzed for The Associated Press by consulting firm Equilar Inc. Meanwhile, wages and benefits netted by private-sector workers rose just 4.1 percent through 2023.

The average CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 268-to-1 for S&P 500 Index companies in 2023. It would take more than five career lifetimes for workers to earn what CEOs receive in just one year.

It wasn’t always that way. After World War II and up until the 1980s, CEOs of large publicly traded companies made about 40 to 50 times the average worker’s pay.

The discrepancy between the compensation afforded to workers and management was an underlying issue in the Boeing strike last fall. That’s not to say that machinists are underpaid—the average salary for a Boeing machinist is around $88,100 per year, 39 percent higher than the national average—it’s the principle of the thing.

Update equipment. It astonishes me how many old machines and tools I see in the factories I visit. I get it. “They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.” But why not invest in the latest technology?

Here are a few more to round out the list: