Industrial manufacturing: modest economic sector growing.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: MANUFACTURING

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What may be most notable about manufacturing in Alaska is the modest size of this economic sector, and consequently, its gentle muscle. While sector employment has been essentially level for several years in the 13,000 range, "there's just not much of it," said Neal Fried, an economist for the State: "It doesn't drive the economy at all." And while growth is foreseen in some comers, the figures are still modest.

MANUFACTURING SECTOR

Nationwide, Fried observed, the manufacturing sector has been one of the losers in the lingering national recession. Millions of factory jobs have disappeared since 2000. But in Alaska, he added, "we're not building washing machines and consumer goods that are being sold around the county.

"That's not to say we think it's good that we don't have any," he added, but it helps to explain why there's seemed to be less of a slowdown in Alaska than in many regions of the Lower 48.

While nationally in 2008 about 12 percent of the gross national product owed to manufacturing, in Alaska it was about 2 percent, Fried said. Seven of the top 100 private-sector industries in 2009 were manufacturing, and this all involved seafood, he said.

The decline of logging in recent decades, with the loss of pulp mills and jobs, represented a big hit to the manufacturing industry, he said. Bakeries and other food product operations still play a lively role.

Helping to fill out the industrial profile are pipes, pumps, tanks, plastics, printing, textiles, breweries and beverages, construction and wood products, paving, refining, machine shops, boats, household, medical equipment, chemicals and some fertilizer production and other light manufacturing.

Besides seafood processing, timber used to be a dominant player, Fried said, but not anymore; there also have been losses on the fertilizer front. Today almost two-thirds of manufacturing employment in Alaska, he said, is tied to seafood processing. The rest of the sector, he added, is made up of a diverse mixture of enterprises.

Industrial manufacturers include companies like Pacific Power Products, which wholesales diesel engines; Greer Tank, making conduits and storage tanks; Cascade Machinery and Electric, which manufactures pumps; Unique Machine, a machine shop that has patented items used by oil companies globally; Alaska Structures; Totem Equipment and Supply, which makes customized heating solutions; Alaska Industrial Resources, pre-fabricated metal buildings...