Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council

Dan Swinney—executive director of the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council and founder of the Center for Labor and Community Research —holds credentials as a thinker and doer that are hard to replicate.  After studying history at the University of Wisconsin during the height of the anti-Vietnam war movement,  he spent 15 years on the factory floor as a turret lathe operator and labor organizer at a series of mid-sized north Chicago manufacturing companies.

After his last employer, Taylor Forge, was taken over and milked for cash by Gulf & Western Corporation, following a pattern that was decimating much of the American manufacturing sector in the 1980s, Swinney founded the Center for Labor and Community Research in 1982. CLCR undertook definitive studies proving that, contrary to the popular wisdom, the vast majority of the manufacturing jobs and companies lost in the “casino economy” could have been saved with a combination of creative capital strategies and a more enlightened social contract among labor, community, government and business.  CLCR has been a gutsy player in valiant attempts—some successful, some less so—to save a number of those companies.

We must now block off the “low road” of short-termism and speculation that is plunging us deeper into societal and environmental malaise and destroying our nation’s critical productive capacity, says Swinney. Reviving and redirecting that capacity to support our transition to a more just and sustainable economy and to build new wealth for all Americans will require labor, community, government and the private sector to abandon their adversarial relationships and work collaboratively. 

The Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council, with its unlikely collaboration among 65 local manufacturing companies, labor unions, the inner city Chicago community of Austin, and Austin Polytechnic High School (founded by Swinney) is showing the way. CLCR and the CMRC will be the subject of an upcoming study in Capital Institute's Field Guide to Investing in a Resilient Economy.—Susan Arterian Chang