Restoring our nation's lost shipbuilding capacity is essential to safeguarding our national security, providing good-paying jobs and ensuring consistent access to needed goods. Our nation is taking great strides toward rebuilding manufacturing and critical supply chains. Now, we need to turn our attention to shipbuilding.
We need policymakers in our nation's capital to support our fight to save our shipbuilding industry.
In 1975, the domestic industry was a leader in global shipbuilding, building more than 70 commercial ships in American shipyards and employing 180,000 workers.
In the early 1980s, federal spending for the construction and operation of the U.S. shipbuilding industry was significantly slashed. Following these cuts, U.S. commercial shipbuilding largely collapsed, unable to compete against foreign competitors that continued to operate with significant and growing subsidies from their own governments.
Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs over the following decades, as major shipyards closed and our nation's shipbuilding industrial base was reduced from close to 30 major yards to only a handful.