The article is suggesting that jobs that can support a family are coming back, but with the described poverty-level $13.50 wages for skilled line workers that's obviously not the case. We're not talking high school dropouts either: among the tasks given to the production workers is redesigning from scratch products which use impractical and inefficient designs, at least according to the scenario explained in the article. The article also points out that these are lines where there are not many workers per line.
My own thoughts about the market were piqued by the description of the chosen product. Here we have an electric heat pump heater that costs over $1300. This is right at a time when running an electric heater, even an exceptionally efficient one, has become a poor choice given the price of gas. Furthermore, gas is very likely to remain cheaper than electric for many years. Not to mention that gas heaters are simply more efficient for heating to begin with. Rather than buy an $1600 chinese or $1300 american water heater, one can buy a $150 mexican factory built water heater that runs on gas and will save many thousands of dollars in energy costs over its lifetime. That's the rational choice, it is unlikely this complicated electric one is going to be something with a lot of market growth. Hopefully there are better examples of high growth reasonably priced mass market items that can be built as well, which have a chance at creating more than a handful of these $13.50 jobs (comparable to the salary at CostCo or McDonalds, BTW).
For water heating one could also do what I did - use $50 worth of materials and junk to build your own solar water heater that reduces the cost of water heating to almost nothing. (http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/1979-09-01/A...)