Recently, a manufacturing executive told me that companies must be more transparent in telling future hires exactly what the job entails. That includes hours, working conditions and expectations. He's lost too many people who didn't realize that putting in a lot of hours was just part of the job. Dan Johnston, co-founder of WorkStep, would whole-heartedly agree. After seeing the struggle, first-hand as a manager of a large third-party logistics company, he set out to make some changes.

Reshoring and foreign direct investment in the U.S. increased 38% during 2018, the highest level in history according to the Reshoring Initiative, the agency formed to advance the effects of "reshoring." The term describes the phenomenon of manufacturers relocating manufacturing activity and services, or sourcing, to the U.S. from overseas. For 2018, the combination of reshoring and FDI represented 145,000 jobs, the second highest annual rate of job increases on record. The total job increases credited to reshoring, including upward revisions of 36,000 jobs in prior years, is over 757,000 since the 2010 low-point for domestic manufacturing employment.