Manufacturing in the Heartland

The Des Moines Register profiles the manufacturing sector in Burlington, Iowa.  Here is one interesting tidbit:

If the future is small manufacturing, Craig Upton’s story is Burlington’s future.
He started a cabinet-making company in 1984 and built shelves for Aldi in the late 1980s. The grocery store chain asked him if he would build checkout lanes for them, he figured those out, and by 2000 he was making checkout lanes out of wood for Aldi, Target and Hy-Vee. In 2004, he got a call from the Siemens plant north of Fort Madison.
“They were looking for a supplier,” he said. “It was just like a perfect phone call.”
Upton’s company, KPI Concepts, went from 35 to 70 employees, and just built a new wing on its factory in West Burlington. The plant produces kits that workers at the Siemens plant use to assemble the wooden innards of windmill blades. The kits are complicated combinations of Russian plywood and Ecuadoran balsa, and they go into giant boxes that can be opened and quickly laid out in sequence.
“We’re making big puzzles,” Upton said.
Upton thinks Burlington is doing OK, though the nature of available jobs is changing. “It’s pretty hard to come out of high school and get some of these jobs,” he said. “We’re actually, truthfully, having a hard time finding people.”

That's an interesting business evolution.  A good portion of the article deals with the Case construction equipment plant in town.  The decline in wages over the years is pretty stark.  Who needs to calculate inflation when wages were over $20 an hour back in the early '80s and new workers start at $13 an hour now.  That's a pretty familiar story in manufacturing communities.