Month: October 2021

By LOU KENNEDY & MIKE LAMACH

Take our word for it: Manufacturers are hiring. Companies like ours, along with thousands of others across the country, are building the workforce of tomorrow and aggressively recruiting to fill millions of well-paying, highly rewarding jobs.

Put another way, we’re saying, “Creators Wanted.” That’s the name of the manufacturing industry’s largest nationwide workforce campaign, which is touring the country to showcase modern manufacturing careers.

There are many paths into a successful manufacturing career. Some jobs include robotics, digital controls and analytics. Other roles help to solve logistical issues to enhance process efficiency. And creators make products that change the quality of life and make the world a better place.

Our companies have openings available for people with every level of educational attainment and prior experience — and we pay well, too. In 2019, the average South Carolina manufacturing employee earned more than $76,000 in pay and benefits, compared with a $43,000 average across all industries. With many opportunities for upward mobility and continuing education, manufacturing careers provide lifelong job security and rewarding work, along with competitive health care and retirement benefits.

At Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corp., for example, we expect to fill up to 500 jobs over the next year, and we’re constantly welcoming interns and apprentices into our ranks. We also provide pharmaceutical certification programs to give high-school students a foot in the door.

And Trane Technologies was recently named one of the Best Workplaces in Manufacturing & Production by Fortune and Great Place to Work®. Our state-of-the art Trane plant in Columbia currently employs more than 1,200 people, and we continue to hire, grow and develop talent each year. Our employees work with purpose, helping to solve for some of the world’s biggest sustainability challenges and innovating for a healthier planet.

Even though we continue to ramp up hiring, we know there’s more to be done: Research by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, the workforce development and education partner of the National Association of Manufacturers (where both of us serve as board members), shows that our industry as a whole will have to fill more than 4 million jobs by the end of the decade — and 2.1 million of those jobs may go unfilled. A major reason more young people aren’t flocking to these jobs is because many still have outdated perceptions about manufacturing, not realizing that it is a high-tech industry.

Creators Wanted is all about showcasing that modern reality. That’s why Nephron and Trane Technologies are proud participants in the campaign, in addition to opening our shop floors year after year to provide young people, families and educators with firsthand exposure to how manufacturers create the many household products and advanced technologies that power our economy.

And Creators Wanted live is a continuation of those efforts. The tour provides access to manufacturing leaders who can provide career guidance and other insights, along with a traveling, immersive experience in which participants work together to solve problems, using some of the same technologies they might find on a modern shop floor. It will debut in Columbia at Nephron Pharmaceuticals and will follow a rigorous set of COVID-19 safety protocols.

This mobile experience is just one part of a comprehensive plan to show people the possibilities awaiting them in modern manufacturing and to provide resources to help them launch a career in the industry. Creators Wanted is so much more than a “help- wanted” ad. It’s an invitation to start an exciting future as one of the people who makes things in America.

Lou Kennedy is president, CEO and owner of Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corp., headquartered in West Columbia. Mike Lamach is executive chair of Trane Technologies. Both are board members of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). 

WEST COLUMBIA, S.C. (WACH) – ‘The future is in manufacturing’ is the message one group is trying to hammer home to young people to help recruit more people for jobs – and fight shortages during the pandemic.

Creators Wanted, a new interactive cross-country touring platform, stopped at Nephron Pharmaceuticals in West Columbia Thursday.

High school students like Tyreke Gilliard got an inside look at what it takes to work in the manufacturing industry, with puzzles to solve – and codes to crack with his classmates inside the mobile truck.

“So far it’s been amazing. I got to learn new things. Talk to new people. And meet new people,” said Gilliard.

“A lot of kids really haven’t seen anything like this, so it might open their minds and get them to explore even further in the depth,” said Dedric Tisdale, a logistics teacher at Lake Marion High School in Orangeburg County, visiting the display with his students.

The National Association of Manufacturers and The Manufacturing Institute launched the interactive experience two weeks ago. Representatives tell WACH FOX News the goal is to reach six-hundred thousand new potential manufacturers.

With supply chain disruptions – and staff shortages due to the pandemic – it’s been difficult to fill the more than nine-hundred thousand job openings in manufacturing nationwide.

“We’ve had to come up with creative and innovative ways to do workarounds. We’re all hiring. We see many of our workforce want to stay at home and not come back,” said Nephron Pharmaceuticals CEO Lou Kennedy, alluding to continuing concerns.

Creators Wanted’ information and presentation is an effort to build back the workforce – and strengthen South Carolina’s economy. SC Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette highlighted its significance.

“We want to make sure that our young people understand that these manufacturing jobs are amazing jobs that help to sustain families and create and build lives,” said Evette. “We’re building dream liners in Charleston. We’re building flyer planes in the upstate. We’re building boats that are going to the Princes of Qatar. South Carolina’s fingerprints are on goods that are going all across the world.”

All to leave a lasting impression on students like Dewayne Hand and other generations of talent.

“I think manufacturing is very important because without it – all this technology wouldn’t exist,” said Hand.

The ‘Creators Wanted’ space will be touring in multiple states next, including Iowa and Pennsylvania. Those that want more information about the experience, jobs and opportunities can visit their website.

By Christina Lee Knauss 

Students from around the Midlands are learning about career opportunities in manufacturing this week through a special event taking place on the campus of Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corp. in West Columbia.  

The Creators Wanted workforce development exhibition is making its only South Carolina stop at the West Columbia plant. It is the brainchild of The National Association of Manufacturers and its workforce development and education partner The Manufacturing Institute. The touring exhibit was developed as a way to both showcase careers in manufacturing and inspire future creators. 

One goal, organizers say, is for young people inspired by the exhibit to eventually help ease the ever-increasing national shortage of employees needed to fill a growing number of manufacturing jobs.  

“We’re out here to inspire, educate and empower young people about choosing careers in manufacturing,” said Chrys Kefalas, vice president of brand strategy for the National Association of Manufacturers. “There are currently 900,000 open jobs in manufacturing in the U.S. — a record — and there’s going to be a need for 4 million manufacturing jobs here between now and 2030, and we want to show the students what these careers have to offer them.” 

Representatives from area manufacturers such as Trane Technologies, Honda and Nephron will be on hand through Friday with information about their products and career opportunities. PTC, a software developer, also has a display that shows how augmented reality can be used to help workers in the field access information to fix a wide variety of products.  

The biggest feature of the exhibit is an RV set up with a series of “escape room”-type features centered around manufacturing. It works just like the popular attractions of the same name that require participants to solve a riddle or mystery before they can leave a locked room, only in this case students must use math, science and logic skills to solve manufacturing-related problems.  
On Wednesday, the exhibit’s first day, more than 250 area students toured the exhibit. Gov. Henry McMaster joined with Nephron owner and CEO Lou Kennedy to take the tour with a group of students from Brookland-Cayce and Airport high schools who study at the Innovation Center in Lexington School District 2. Many of the students who attended are juniors and seniors interested in science and technology who are beginning to seriously consider career paths.  

Kennedy said the exhibition offers her company and others an important chance to let young people know just how much the manufacturing sector in South Carolina has to offer them.  

“Students need to be aware that many of these jobs we are talking about are high-paying jobs, with salaries in the mid-70s, which is much higher than the average salary in South Carolina,” Kennedy said. “There’s no need for our students to be looking out of state when we have these kinds of jobs right here in the Midlands. We encourage students to look at what we at Nephron have to offer — we’re hiring at all levels — and we encourage them look at what other companies have to offer, and use all the opportunities available to them.”  

Kennedy said she also encourages other manufacturing companies to reach out to their local schools to promote career opportunities through programs such as youth apprenticeships.  

“I tell companies that if you’re not involved in your local schools, you’re missing out on opportunities to find future employees,” she said.  

“Our goal in being out here is to make sure these students understand there are lots of opportunities for them with us,” said Gregg Krick, plant manager at Trane Technologies, which builds HVAC equipment at its plant off I-77 in northeast Columbia near Blythewood. “We recently quadrupled our workforce and expanded our facility and we’re going to need even more employees in the near future. I’m impressed because I’ve already talked with several students who have a genuine interest in what we do.”  

Kefalas estimates that 500 area students will have taken part in Creators Wanted by the time the exhibition closes on Friday.

BY LOU KENNEDY

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he made reining in prescription drug prices a core promise of his candidacy. Since then, drug pricing has been at the top of the to-do list for every U.S. president.

Nearly 30 years later, Washington still hasn’t answered the question of how to keep prescription drug prices low for people who need them. This is due in part to a fundamental flaw in the marketplace, known as “pay-for-delay.” Pay-for-delay agreements keep prices high by keeping generic drugmakers out of the marketplace. It’s time for Congress and regulators to lower prices, welcome more competition and remove the barriers that protect big drugmakers at the expense of patients.

Today, American patients pay more than 2½ times as much for the same prescription drugs as patients in our peer countries. Pharmaceutical price increases surpassed inflation once again last year. This isn’t a new problem: Previous administrations, from Clinton to Trump, have explored voluntary price restraints from drug manufacturers to keep costs down. Those efforts have had little long-term effect. The Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll found that a quarter of adults taking prescription medications have difficulty paying for them.
Pay-for-delay patent settlements fuel the drug affordability problem by creating a lack of competition in the marketplace. Brand-name pharmaceutical companies use these agreements to delay generic competition, keeping drug prices higher for longer. They stem from patent settlements between brand-name companies and major generic manufacturers.

When a generic manufacturer files a new patent for an existing drug, the brand-name company will pay the generic drugmaker to keep its product off the market. The Federal Trade Commission has called such arrangements a “win-win” for the two parties involved in the agreement: The brand-name company keeps prices inflated while the generic manufacturer profits off a monopoly it agrees to keep in place.

But these agreements also have a big loser: consumers. Americans who rely on prescription drugs may face prices that are as much as 90% higher than they would in an open market with multiple generic manufacturers. One FTC study estimated that pay-for-delay agreements cost consumers as much as $3.5 billion per year.

The study also found that these agreements typically keep generic drugs off the market for an extra 17 months. Smaller drug manufacturers that lack the financial, legal and organizational heft of large brand-name and generic companies essentially can get to market only if a patent is defeated multiple times.

That becomes nearly impossible with pay-for-delay agreements in place. Given the decades-long push to rein in the rising costs of prescription drugs for consumers, it’s perplexing that these agreements, which do nothing more than protect monopolies, are still allowed to exist.
The Federal Trade Commission clearly recognizes the problem with pay-for-delay and similar patent agreements.

Now it’s time for the agency to step in on behalf of consumers and ban these agreements in order to foster real competition in the pharmaceutical industry.

President Joe Biden notably called on the commission to ban pay-for-delay in his executive order promoting competition in the American economy. In a truly open and competitive pharmaceutical market, multiple generic manufacturers can apply for a brand-name drug’s patent, which would lower the price of that drug by 60% to 80% over time.

This is a straightforward solution to a persistent problem and would finally lower prescription drug costs for consumers after decades of debate and false-start policy solutions. Without a change to this policy, weak and unchallenged patents will continue to artificially control the pricing dynamics of the prescription drug market.

More affordable prescription drug pricing is within reach. By opening up the market and allowing real competition — instead of allowing the biggest players to make mutually beneficial arrangements that keep prices artificially high — policymakers can finally make a real dent in prescription prices.

The FTC should end pay-for-delay and deliver a win for consumers across the country.

Lou Kennedy is the CEO of Nephron Pharmaceuticals.