Hazelett Strip Casting is a Colchester company that makes massive machines which help turn molten metal into rolls and sheets. Hazelett is clearly in the manufacturing business. So is Sean Lawson who makes his award winning beer, Lawson’s Finest Liquids, in a brewery located next to his home. The food production part of Vermont’s manufacturing sector, which includes Lawson's Finest, is having great success competing globally and contributing to Vermont’s economic growth.
“I think a lot of that is attributable to some of the things are going on in Vermont branding, particularly in food manufacturing,” says Jeffrey Carr, a Vermont economist who advises the Governor. “We have examples of Green Mountain Coffee Roasts and Cabot Co-op and things like that but we’re not only known now for the quality of the cheese we make, we’re increasingly becoming known for the quality of the beer we brew.”
Carr is on the board of the New England Economic Partnership, which has just released a periodic forecast for the region’s economy. The new outlook stresses the role manufacturing will play in Vermont’s economic growth. It says a lot of that will come from competing in the global market.
The outlook, which calls Vermont’s projected growth ‘moderately positive’ is tempered with a few warnings and Carr cites the impact of the sequester, a troubled European economy, and possible layoffs at a large employer like IBM as caveats to the forecast.
Although the recovery has had many ups and downs and will continue to be slow in Vermont and elsewhere, the report says that through March Vermont had recovered 80 percent of the payroll jobs lost during the recession.
Carr says he is skeptical of claims that Vermont’s workforce is shrinking. He says he’s more concerned about the readiness of the workforce to fill manufacturing jobs that will help spur future economic growth in the state.
