Dan DiMicco has been preaching the manufacturing gospel for as long as he has been the chief executive at Nucor Corp. During those 10 years, he has led the company to record profits and through two major financial downturns. In the most recent recession, he says, increasing numbers of business and government leaders have come around to thinking the nation needs to rebuild its manufacturing base. And that has given DiMicco a larger platform for his campaign.

He took the argument to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal late last year. He has taken it to Washington, both to Congress and the White House. His rising national profile also includes a spot on Harvard Business School’s ranking of the top 100 CEOs in the world.

But he has also had his hands full with an economic downturn that sent the company spiraling to losses in 2009. The company managed to return to the black in the final quarter of the year. Nucor expects continued weakness in the economy this year.

DiMicco recently sat down with the Charlotte Business Journal to talk about his company and his view of what the U.S. economy needs to put the recession behind it.

CBJ: You have been talking for some time about the need to make the United States a producing nation. But it seems lately you have been ramping up that message.

DiMicco: We’ve been delivering that message for about 10 years. It’s just that the (economic) crisis has brought it into sharper focus. So now people are listening because it's apparent that what we’ve been talking about is right.

CBJ: Who is listening? Are you getting a response from business leaders and government leaders?

DiMicco: Both. Absolutely. Obviously you saw the Wall Street Journal op-ed. We got a tremendous positive response on that. And also in Washington, we’ve been involved with the Jobs Summit, we’ve been involved with the vice president’s Manufacturing and the Middle Class Summit. I am on the Department of Commerce Manufacturing Council. I have been for two years, starting in the Bush administration, and it’s carried over to the Obama administration.

There’s serious conversation. I meet with business leaders, whether it be one-on-one meetings—in fact, Monday I had the good fortune to sit down with (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt for two and a half hours in his offices in Fairfield, Connecticut, on these very issues. In fact, if you followed Jeff’s public statements, you took a look at his letter to the shareholders a year ago, you see where he has made a significant change in GE’s approach to domestic manufacturing and the importance of it.

Also he gave a speech in Detroit, Michigan, last year where he highlighted the need to grow manufacturing in this country back to the point where it was at least 20 percent of GDP, as opposed to the current 9.9 percent. He firmly agrees about the fact that we have allowed the destruction of the middle class to occur by not making sure that we maintained a strongly growing private manufacturing sector.

CBJ: How does that translate into action?

DiMicco: Today’s multinational companies are more and more seeing the benefit (of domestic production) because of high energy costs. Because of intellectual-property issues. Because of transportation costs. Because of the rapid collapse that took place in our economy, both here and around the world, back in the fall of 2008. The supply chains that were extended by global movements of parts, materials, and what have you, they had to take some serious multibillion-dollar write-downs. Nucor was also exposed to that. We had a six-month pig-iron commitment. It was very expensive, and we lived up to the commitment. But it hurt us.

So all these things coming together, I think, are starting to highlight the need for producing domestically and sourcing domestically, whether you are China or the United States. Certainly the U.S. manufacturers of steel are a good example. We are among the lowest-cost steel manufacturers in the world. China’s not a low-cost place to make steel.

And our labor costs are miniscule compared just to the costs of freight to move the steel from China to here, let alone the costs of taking raw materials from around the world and bringing them to China.

CBJ: Is there a concern about whether we can compete on labor costs?

DiMicco: Today, most manufacturing issues are not labor intensive. The steel industry certainly is not a labor-intensive industry. So there’s no reason we can’t competitively supply domestic manufacturers with product. We are all going to be affected by global trends and global pricing. But if the government does its job and makes sure our trading partners are partners rather than trading competitors, that our trading partners hold to the rules they agreed to get access to our market—nothing more, nothing less—then we can see a vibrant manufacturing sector in this country again. It will again be providing that transition from "those that don’t" to "those that do," which I certainly benefited from growing up.

CBJ: Describe what you see as the benefits of domestic manufacturing.

DiMicco: We’ve lost our middle class. Not because it’s a rich-poor thing. But basically because we lost the jobs that allow people the opportunity to reach the status of lower, middle, and upper middle class. That ladder no longer is there, or most of the rungs are broken. And we need to rebuild that.

And we should be a country that makes things. It’s in our long-term and short-term best interest as a world leader. And we can do it and be competitive as long as we have our government not putting burdens on us that other countries don’t have to deal with. Whether they be tax issues, regulatory issues—including environmental extremism.