How a manufacturer operates
A manufacturer is a place. Its revenue is earned on a production floor where people, machines and materials must be in the same room at the same time; its inputs arrive at a dock from other plants in other States and other countries; its output leaves by the same dock for customers whose own premises were closed, capped or conditioned by their own orders; its orders are won at trade shows and on customer visits and kept by technicians who travel; its engineers, estimators and sales staff work in an office attached to the plant; and its workforce commutes, sends its children to school and lives under the same stay-at-home, quarantine and school orders as everyone else. Every one of those functions is a point at which an order limiting commerce, travel or group meetings reached the operation, and the sections that follow show that in every quarter orders reached every one of them. This section describes the functions in the operational terms an order can reach, states the revenue lines, maps the counterparties and the workforce, and closes with a table that ties each class of counterparty to the orders that bound it.
The industry in numbers
Manufacturing employed 12,743,000 people in February 2020, 11,382,000 in April 2020 and 12,393,000 on September 30, 2021; the April 2020 loss was 1,361,000 jobs, 10.7 percent of the industry, and on the last day of the last claimable quarter the industry remained 350,000 jobs below its February 2020 level.1 The Federal Reserve's industrial production index recorded a 13.7 percent fall in manufacturing output in April 2020, "its largest decline on record," a 19.3 percent fall in durable-goods output, a fall of "more than 70 percent" in motor vehicles and parts after "essentially month-long closures of most factories producing motor vehicles and civilian aircraft," and capacity utilization of 64.9 percent (Ex. SEC-10-090).2 The Census Bureau's Small Business Pulse Survey found in the week ending July 18, 2021 that 64.6 percent of small manufacturers reported domestic supplier delays, the highest share of any sector, and that 15.9 percent of all small businesses reported foreign supplier delays (Ex. LAW-243).3 The Federal Reserve's Beige Books of July 14 and September 8, 2021 recorded "shortages of materials and labor, delivery delays, and low inventories," the "ongoing microchip shortage" and "extensive labor shortages that were constraining employment and, in many cases, impeding business activity," attributed in part to "childcare needs" (Ex. ECO-A-106; Ex. ECO-A-107; Ex. ECO-B-090).4 Those figures are facts and circumstances, not orders; the orders are inventoried in the sections that follow.
PF. The production floor
Production runs in shifts on fixed lines, in cells or in batch processes. Workers share tools, gauges, controls, forklifts, break rooms, locker rooms and time clocks; a line is staffed at a fixed density set by the work stations, not by the workers' preference; a shift change puts two crews in the same space; a machine that stops for cleaning is a machine that does not produce. Every one of those features was the subject of an order. The closure orders stopped the floor outright in the States that closed non-listed manufacturing: Michigan (March 24 to May 11, 2020), Pennsylvania (March 19 to May 8 through June 5, 2020 by county), New York (March 22 to May 15 through June 8, 2020 by region), Illinois (March 21 to May 29, 2020), Washington (March 25, 2020 to Phase 1 by county), Minnesota (March 27 to April 27, 2020), Massachusetts (March 24 to May 18, 2020), Ohio (March 23 to May 4, 2020), Wisconsin (March 25 to May 13, 2020), Kentucky (March 26 to May 11, 2020), Texas (non-CISA manufacturing, April 2 to May 17, 2020), Vermont, Hawaii, Delaware, Colorado, New Mexico, California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, North Carolina, Maryland and the District of Columbia.5 The restart orders rebuilt the floor on the State's terms: daily entry screening with temperature checks, dedicated entry points with barriers, staggered shift starts and breaks, six-foot spacing "for their entire shift" with barriers where spacing was not feasible, tool-sharing limits, suspension of "all non-essential in-person visits, including tours," notification and shutdown of areas for cleaning after a case, and face coverings "required for all workers."6 The State workplace standards of Virginia, Oregon, California, Michigan and New York codified those conditions as regulations binding every employer, with written plans, exposure classification of every job, exclusion of exposed and infected workers with pay, testing, training and record-keeping.7 The statewide face-covering requirements of more than thirty States, airborne-transmission controls imposed on every indoor workplace, reached every production floor where a non-household person was present, and the indoor face-covering and exposure-control orders of July through September 2021 in Washington, Illinois, Nevada, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oregon and the District of Columbia and in the largest cities and counties governed the floor in the last claimable quarter.8 A production floor ordered to run at six feet, in staggered shifts, with disinfected tools and screened entrants, is a production floor whose throughput the order fixed.
WH. Warehouse, shipping and receiving
Finished goods and inbound materials move through a dock where the manufacturer's employees and other employers' drivers meet, sign, inspect and load. New Jersey wrote the dock into its orders ("Prohibit non-essential visitors from entering the worksite"), Kentucky required "minimal interaction between drivers at loading docks" and vehicle occupancy limits, Michigan prescribed delivery protocols, and the port and rail authorities and the Coast Guard governed every containerized input and export at the terminal gate: temperature checks at every Georgia Ports Authority access point with entry refused at 100.4 degrees, Port of Virginia truck-gate rules enforced by removal from the terminal, the CDC conveyance order's face-covering requirement, an airborne-transmission control the order imposed on every conveyance and transportation hub and bound every operator to enforce, as the Coast Guard's bulletin applied it at every "cargo handling facility" from March 22, 2021, and the Coast Guard's bulletins on crew confinement and illness reporting aboard every arriving vessel, guidance to the maritime industry that ran from March 2020 through September 30, 2021 and is described here as such.9 The Federal Railroad Administration's Emergency Order No. 32 imposed a face-covering requirement, an airborne-transmission control the carrier was bound to enforce, in every rail yard, shop, terminal and crew room from March 1, 2021 under a civil penalty of up to $118,826 a day (Ex. AGY-AVIATION-SURFACE-014).10
SC. Inbound supply
A manufacturer's inputs come from tier suppliers, and the tier suppliers of the United States are concentrated in the States that closed non-listed manufacturing in March 2020: Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California. When Michigan closed every plant not "necessary to sustain or protect life," when Pennsylvania closed every business "that is not a life sustaining business," when New York cut the in-person workforce of every business not exempted as essential to zero and when Wisconsin declared that suppliers to non-essential businesses "are non-essential," the suppliers of every manufacturer in every State stopped shipping.11 The Federal Reserve recorded the result on April 15, 2020: "[s]ome other manufacturing industries, such as autos, mostly shut down," with "widespread mandatory closures" and "supply chain disruptions" (Ex. ECO-A-104).12 The federal layer redirected the remainder: the Defense Production Act orders compelled General Motors, 3M and six ventilator manufacturers to accept and prioritize government orders (Ex. SEC-10-010; Ex. SEC-10-011; Ex. SEC-10-012), the Department of Health and Human Services designated fifteen categories of respirators, masks, gloves, gowns, ventilators and disinfectants as "scarce materials" whose accumulation above reasonable demand was a federal crime (Ex. FED-074), and FEMA barred their export without federal approval from April 7, 2020 to June 30, 2021 (Ex. SEC-10-004; Ex. SEC-10-008; Ex. SEC-10-009), so that every manufacturer whose reopening order required masks, gloves and sanitizer bought them in a market under federal allocation.13 Foreign inputs came from plants and ports governed by the entry proclamations and land-border notices of the United States, in force without a day's interruption from March 2020 to November 8, 2021 (Ex. FED-207; Ex. FED-233), and operated in the circumstances of the foreign orders that closed Ontario's non-listed businesses from March 24, 2020, suspended every "actividad no esencial" in Mexico from March 31 to May 30, 2020, capped Malaysia's manufacturing workforce at 60 percent from June 1 to August 15, 2021, locked down Ho Chi Minh City and the southern provinces of Vietnam from July 2021 to September 30, 2021, and placed Taiwan under a nationwide Level 3 alert from May 19 to July 26, 2021 (Ex. FOR-005; Ex. FOR-006; Ex. FOR-032; Ex. FOR-033; Ex. FOR-035).14 The White House's own 100-day review of June 8, 2021 found that the pandemic "created a global semiconductor chip shortage," that vehicle plants lost production "due to a six-week industry shutdown," and that the world "depends on Taiwanese firms for 92 percent of leading-edge semiconductor production" (Ex. ECO-A-101).15
DS. Distribution and customers
A manufacturer's customers are other employers, and every class of them was closed, capped or conditioned by order: original-equipment plants under the closure orders above; dealers whose showrooms were closed in the stay-at-home States and whose motor-vehicle offices were closed in nearly every State; retailers whose non-essential stores were closed from March 2020 to May and June 2020 and capped to the spring of 2021; contractors whose job sites were shut in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Washington, Vermont and Massachusetts; restaurants whose dining rooms were closed in every State in March 2020 and capped through 2021; hospitals whose elective procedures were suspended in the spring of 2020 and whose entrants were screened, masked and, from August 2021, vaccinated by order; schools, colleges and public bodies under their own closure and remote orders; and the federal government itself, the largest customer in the country, whose agencies operated at maximum telework and whose contractors were placed under the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force's rules from July 29, 2021 and Executive Order 14042 from September 9, 2021.16 The fall of more than 70 percent in motor-vehicle output in April 2020 was a fall in every automotive supplier's shipments in every State; a closed dealership buys no parts; a capped dining room orders no equipment; a hospital that has cancelled its elective schedule orders no devices for it.17
EN. Engineering, sales and the technical office
The engineering, estimating, quality, purchasing, sales and administrative functions of a manufacturer sit in an office attached to or near the plant. The telework mandates reached them in terms: New Jersey's "must accommodate their workforce, wherever practicable, for telework or work-from-home arrangements" (March 21, 2020 to June 4, 2021); Pennsylvania's "Unless not possible, all businesses are required to conduct their operations in whole or in part remotely" (July 16, 2020) and "Unless impossible, all businesses must conduct their operations remotely" (issued November 23, 2020; effective November 27, 2020, to April 3, 2021); Illinois' direction that manufacturers "allow only manufacturing staff and key personnel in facilities, with non-production employees to work remotely where possible" (November 20, 2020); Michigan's MIOSHA rule that "The employer shall create a policy prohibiting in-person work for employees to the extent that their work activities can feasibly be completed remotely" (October 14, 2020 to May 24, 2021); Minnesota's "All workers who can work from home must do so" (March 27, 2020, carried to April 14, 2021); Oregon's "Work in offices is prohibited whenever telework and work-at-home options are available"; Kentucky's 33 percent office mandate (November 20 to December 13, 2020); Washington's "Professional Services are required to mandate that employees work from home when possible" (November 17, 2020 to January 11, 2021); Georgia's "teleworking for all possible workers"; New York's 50, 75 and 100 percent in-person reductions and its 50 percent office ceiling to May 19, 2021; Connecticut's telework clause and 50 percent office rule to May 20, 2021.18 An engineering office ordered remote cannot walk to the floor to solve a tooling problem, cannot host a customer's quality audit and cannot run a first-article inspection with the customer's engineer present; the order changed the operation.
OP. Office, administration and finance
The same remote-work mandates governed the administrative office in the same words, and on every day of the six quarters the office's counterparties ran under orders of their own: the courts, under judicial emergency orders that suspended jury trials, closed courthouses and tolled deadlines; the recorders and licensing offices, closed to the public in March 2020 and reopened by appointment; the financial regulators, under forbearance rules and foreclosure and eviction moratoria that ran to September 30, 2021; and the utilities, under shut-off suspensions. A collection suit that could not be filed, a lien that could not be recorded, a title that could not be transferred and a hearing held by video are each a modification the office did not choose; the instruments are inventoried under office, administration and finance in the function-by-function section.
EV. Trade shows, customer events and demonstrations
Manufacturers sell at shows. Every venue cap closed a show: Illinois capped "[i]ndoor venues and meeting spaces" at "the lesser of fifty attendees or fifty percent of room capacity" from June 26, 2020 and made them "prohibited from hosting gatherings of any size" from November 20, 2020 (Ex. SEC-10-037; Ex. SEC-10-038), which is why no exhibition of any size opened at McCormick Place between March 2020 and July 2021, when the authority itself recorded that the hall had been "closed since March of 2020" (Ex. AGY-LOCAL-DISTRICTS-AUTHORITIES-027); Nevada capped gatherings at 250 or 50 percent from October 1, 2020 and at 50 persons or 25 percent from November 24, 2020 to February 14, 2021 (Ex. NV-028; Ex. NV-030), so that the industry's autumn and winter shows in Las Vegas ran digitally or not at all; Michigan prohibited every indoor non-residential gathering from November 18, 2020 to January 31, 2021 (Ex. MI-060; Ex. ECO-B-076; Ex. MI-062; Ex. MI-063); California barred conventions in every tier of its Blueprint to June 15, 2021 (Ex. CA-017; Ex. CA-055); Georgia barred live venues and conventions before July 1, 2020 and capped gatherings at fifty to April 7, 2021 (Ex. GA-024; Ex. GA-034); Maryland provided that "Convention events are prohibited" from June 12, 2020 and capped them at 50 percent to May 15, 2021 (Ex. MD-046).19 The industry's national shows, the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago in September of even years among them, fell inside those caps, and the halls' own records fix the result: McCormick Place "closed since March of 2020," the Javits Center with "no events since March 10th" and none scheduled through June 2020 (Ex. AGY-LOCAL-DISTRICTS-AUTHORITIES-027; Ex. AGY-LOCAL-DISTRICTS-AUTHORITIES-055).
TR. Business travel and field service
Manufacturers keep customers by visiting them and servicing what they sold. Customer visits and field service ran through the State travel quarantines: New York's Executive Order 205 (June 25, 2020 to April 1, 2021, with a $10,000 penalty), Connecticut's Executive Order 7III (July 24, 2020 to March 19, 2021), Massachusetts' Order No. 45 (August 1, 2020 to March 22, 2021, $500 a day), Pennsylvania's testing-or-quarantine order (November 20, 2020 to March 1, 2021), Hawaii's quarantine on every arrival (March 26, 2020 to 11:59 p.m. March 25, 2022), Alaska's (March 25, 2020 to February 14, 2021), New Mexico's (July 1, 2020 to February 10, 2021), Kansas's continuous list, Chicago's Emergency Travel Order and the spring 2020 quarantines of Texas, Florida, Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Delaware, Kentucky, Montana and Idaho, each of which attached fourteen days' exclusion to a technician's arrival from a listed State.20 Business flights ran under the federal conveyance order and the TSA directives from February 1, 2021 (Ex. FED-020; Ex. FED-050; Ex. FED-051; Ex. FED-052), international travel under the entry proclamations and the pre-departure testing order (Ex. FED-207; Ex. FED-042), and every trip to Canada or Mexico under the land-border notices (Ex. FED-216; Ex. FED-235).21
HR. Hiring, screening, training and credentialing
The restart orders and the State standards made screening a condition of every shift and training a condition of every hire; Michigan required daily entry screening with temperature checks, Virginia required exposure classification of every job task and training for very-high, high and medium exposure workplaces, Cal/OSHA required a written prevention program, training and records, and MIOSHA required a preparedness plan with a designated coordinator.22 The motor-vehicle offices through which manufacturers hire and credential drivers closed to the public in nearly every State between March 16 and March 27, 2020 and reopened by appointment between May 2020 and July 2021, closures the agencies announced (Ex. AGY-ST-DMV-SOS-RECORDERS-018, the California announcement, described here as such) and the States accommodated by credential-extension orders and statutes (Ex. AGY-ST-DMV-SOS-RECORDERS-006; Ex. AGY-ST-DMV-SOS-RECORDERS-043); the Department of Transportation's statement of enforcement discretion for substance abuse professionals and service agents, an agency statement described here as such, relaxed the in-person evaluation and requalification requirements of every regulated employer from April 4, 2020 to December 31, 2021 (Ex. AGY-AVIATION-SURFACE-046); the State Department cancelled every routine visa appointment in the world from March 20, 2020 and resumed post by post (Ex. FED-327; the Department's announcement, Ex. AGY-FED-LABOR-IMMIGRATION-060); the President suspended the entry of H-1B, H-2B, L and J workers from June 24, 2020 to March 31, 2021 (Ex. FED-211; Ex. FED-213); and USCIS suspended every face-to-face service from March 18 to June 4, 2020 (Ex. FED-324; Ex. FED-325).23
WF. Workforce availability
A plant's workforce is hourly, commutes by car and by transit, and has children. Every State closed its schools to in-person instruction between March 12 and March 23, 2020, forty-eight kept them closed for the rest of the school year, and at their peak the closures reached at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 schools; the States confined child care to the children of essential workers; the fall of 2020 opened remote or hybrid in most large districts; and the 2021-22 year opened under face-covering and quarantine orders in eighteen States and the District that kept exposed children, and their parents, at home.24 Congress ordered every employer under 500 employees to pay leave to any worker "subject to a Federal, State, or local quarantine or isolation order related to COVID-19" or caring for a child whose "school or place of care ... has been closed," from April 1 to December 31, 2020, and the Department of Labor's rule defined "quarantine or isolation order" to include stay-at-home orders (Ex. FED-170; Ex. FED-171).25 The State health departments' isolation and quarantine directives, and the State workplace standards' exclusion rules, removed exposed workers from the floor by law; New Jersey capped every train and bus at 50 percent from April 13, 2020; the New York subway closed nightly for the first time in its history from May 6, 2020 to May 17, 2021; and from February 1, 2021 every commute by public conveyance ran under a federal face-covering and exposure-control order enforced by criminal penalty.26
CB. The customer base
The stay-at-home orders confined the consumers who buy the industry's goods, and the closure and capacity orders confined the businesses that resell them; the next section treats those orders as what the statute calls them, orders limiting commerce.
Revenue lines, geography and seasonality
The industry's revenue lines are sales of goods to OEM, distributor, retail, contractor, institutional and government customers; aftermarket parts and service; tooling and engineering; and export. Its geography concentrates the closure exposure: the Great Lakes automotive and machinery belt (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin), the Northeast (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut), the Southeast automotive corridor (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina), Texas and California. Its seasonality fell into the orders: the automotive model-year changeover and summer shutdown in July; the fourth-quarter capital-equipment cycle; the show calendar; the spring build for construction and agricultural equipment; the summer and fall build of consumer goods for the holidays. A plant closed in March and April 2020 lost its spring build; a plant ordered to run at six feet with staggered shifts in the fall of 2020 ran its holiday build at the order's throughput.
The counterparty map
The table below states, for each class of counterparty, the orders that reached it and the part of this page that inventories them.
| Counterparty class | Orders that reached it | Where inventoried |
|---|
| Tier suppliers and contract manufacturers | State closure orders (MI, PA, NY, NJ, IL, OH, WI, MN, MA, WA, CA); DPA priority orders; HHS scarce-materials designation; FEMA export bar | The fifty States; The federal layer; The interconnected economy |
| Foreign suppliers and export customers | Entry proclamations; DHS land-border notices; CDC testing order; Title 42; foreign orders as context | The federal layer; The interconnected economy |
| Carriers, ports, rail and customs | CDC conveyance order at the ports (Coast Guard bulletins as implementing guidance); port authority gate rules; FRA Emergency Order No. 32; CBP duty postponement | The sector regulators; The counterparties |
| OEM, dealer, retail, contractor and institutional customers | Closure, capacity and elective-procedure orders in every State; motor-vehicle office closures; construction shutdowns | The fifty States; The counterparties |
| Show organizers and venues | Gathering caps and venue closures (IL, NV, MI, CA, GA, MD and others); convention-center conversions | The fifty States; The largest metros; The counterparties |
| Customers and technicians in other States | State travel quarantines; conveyance order; TSA directives | The federal layer; The counterparties |
| Schools, child care and transit | School closure and 2021-22 face-covering and exposure-control orders; child-care emergency-only orders; FFCRA; transit orders | The counterparties; The interconnected economy |
| Health-care providers | Elective-procedure suspensions; CMS rules; OSHA Healthcare ETS; health-care-worker mandates | The counterparties |
| Courts, clerks and licensing offices | Court administrative orders; motor-vehicle and recorder closures; remote-notarization orders | The sector regulators; The counterparties |
| Federal agencies as customers | OMB telework directives; Task Force rules; Executive Order 14042; Department of Defense travel restrictions | The federal layer |