This just might mean something for millions of unemployed manufacturing workers across America.

Dana Morey, executive vice-president of Morey Corp., remember well Chinese New Year two years ago, when they were calling all over Shenzhen, China, trying unsuccessfully to find someone who could pick up a load of finished parts from a factory during the two-week holiday and ship them to Chicago. Then it was holes not drilled deeply enough in a shipment of circuit boards from a Chinese supplier. Similar problems have occurred in metal and plastic castings.

Morey is part of the wave of “near-shoring” or “re-shoring” of production that gained momentum during the recession. Manufacturers are bringing work back to the U.S. because of the rising cost of shipping, labor and raw materials—coupled with quality problems and shortened lead times from customers unable to predict their own orders in a still-choppy economy.

“People are starting to see they went too far in outsourcing,” says Harry Moser, former chairman of Lincolnshire-based machine-tool maker AgieCharmilles LLC and a proponent of bringing manufacturing work back to the U.S.

The near-shoring trend is hard to quantify, however. A January study by Chicago-based accounting firm Grant Thornton LLP found that 20% of the 312 companies it surveyed had shifted from Asian suppliers last year to partners closer to home, mostly in the U.S. And 12% planned to do so this year.

While it’s not enough to reverse the 40-year shift in manufacturing from the U.S. to Asia, Mexico and Latin America, winning back some work that had gone overseas is helping manufacturers recover from the deep downturn that started three years ago.

Let’s see how many manufacturing companies follow suit in the coming year. So far, Caterpillar, Ford Motor, General Electric, and NCR have already moved operations and thousands of jobs back to the U.S.