Treasury secretary tours Charlotte Siemens plant

President Barack Obama mentioned Charlotte’s Siemens plant in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and it stayed in the spotlight Wednesday as U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner visited to talk about the importance of the manufacturing industry.

Most people have never seen the inside of Siemens' sprawling turbine assembly plant off Westinghouse Boulevard.

On Wednesday, Geithner not only saw it, stopping to talk with workers along the way, but he also called it a prime example of the kind of manufacturing America needs to produce jobs.

“A lot of how we grow as a country in the future depends on our ability to do more things like this,” Geithner said.

Siemens employs 1,400 people, making turbines and generators for power plants around the world.

And all of its 700 most recent hires have something in common: They took training courses developed in a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College.

“The neat thing they've done is come and say, ‘What do you need?’” said Mark Pringle with Siemens. “And they're creating curriculum custom-designed to what we need.”

It's that kind of collaboration that Obama talked about Tuesday night in his State of the Union address, and that Geithner mentioned again Wednesday afternoon in a question-and-answer session at the Charlotte Chamber.

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“The need to make sure we're investing in rebuilding the country -- making manufacturing stronger,” Geithner said.

Manufacturing now accounts for 30,000 jobs in Mecklenburg County.  National attention on Siemens underscores how important it can be to Charlotte's future.