How many manufacturing jobs are in the us

In recent congressional testimony, U. He also praised both the U. It is important to note that the Trump administration has a habit of issuing press releases citing plans for major foreign investments in the U. But offshoring has in fact continued throughout this time, as reflected in changes in the total number of U.

Overall, the U. Nearly 1, factories have disappeared during the Trump administration between and BLS ; U. Census Bureau a, b. The U. Census Bureau Business Dynamics Statistics data for — Establishment numbers: EPI analysis of U. Census Bureau County Business Patterns data for — Employment per plant has ebbed and flowed, increasing during recoveries and dropping much more sharply in downturns, as shown in Figure A. Massive job losses in just six years—during the recession and the China import surge of —, and during the Great Recession of ——account for more than all of the net loss of nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs in this period.

The loss of these jobs was particularly costly for women, Black, and Latinx workers, who were left behind as employment collapsed and many of the remaining manufacturing plants shifted to rural locations in right-to-work states in the West and South Madland, Walter, and Eisenbrey But these gains are exactly on par with gains across the entire economic recovery period from to , during which , manufacturing jobs were gained each year, on average. And while the June data show an upswing in manufacturing jobs, more recent jobs data indicate that the nascent and partial recovery in manufacturing is at risk due to recurrence of COVID in states that have reopened, including many in the South and Western United States Hannon and Kiernan ; WSJ Pro ; Bartash Contrary to popular myth, growing trade deficits, and not automation, are responsible for the vast bulk of manufacturing job and plant losses in the past two decades Guilford Growing trade deficits with China between and 2.

Starting in , the U. More than half of that rise has come since the Trump tariffs were first imposed in March This stronger dollar keeps making U. Equally problematic, the Trump tax cuts on corporate profits incentivized offshoring for certain types of production while also raising after-tax profits.

This has attracted more foreign capital to U. Note: Rates in currency units per U. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has simply ignored the linkage between these policies and a rising U. While the Treasury did, finally, name China a currency manipulator last year, it was too little, too late Scott Notably, the agreement was neither a binding constraint on Chinese monetary policy nor a real commitment to action on the part of the U.

Overvaluation of the dollar is one of the most important structural causes of growing U. In order to help rebalance U. The strength of the dollar was sustained by massive currency manipulation between and Bergsten and Gagnon , but since then large private capital inflows to U.

There are several tools that can be used to address dollar overvaluation. Their proposal would direct the U. Federal Reserve Board of Governors to set this tax at a level needed to rebalance trade and capital flows, giving the Fed both a new mandate—to achieve balanced trade—and a new tool to achieve that goal. Millions of good, high-wage manufacturing jobs can be created by rebalancing trade flows, something that would contribute to recovery from the COVID recession.

But the U. In fact, the real U. Source: EPI analysis of data from U. There is a single world price for commodity products like wheat and soybeans, as Dean Baker has noted Baker , If the dollar rises relative to those of our competitors, then the dollar price of U. Thus, there is a strong, negative correlation between soybean prices, for example, and exchange rates, as shown in Figure E. When the real price-adjusted dollar declines, as it did between and , soybean prices increase.

Grain and soybean prices started falling as soon as the dollar began to rise in We need to realign the dollar to rebalance trade. Manufacturing and the farm sector will both benefit directly from dollar realignment. Census Bureau c. And when it comes to important sectors like autos and auto parts, General Motors has been closing assembly plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland while increasing its reliance on imports from Mexico AP ; Samilton ; Mirabella In fact, GM has been ceding market share to foreign producers for decades, and has grown increasingly reliant on imports from Mexico and other countries.

Meanwhile, market share has been captured by foreign producers. And the supplier networks for these plants will be built in Mexico, not the U. The Phase One China trade deal is a bust, too. China promised to increase purchases of U. But Beijing is unlikely to meet these targets Craymer and DeBarros Beijing has also strategically adjusted to the Trump tariffs. China is simply exporting more goods elsewhere, and the U.

China also reduced the value of its currency by As a result, the U. Leading suppliers of pharmaceutical imports—many produced by U. But unless steps are taken to address dollar overvaluation and the tax incentives that encourage offshoring, these deficits will simply reemerge when recovery occurs Scott a.

Voters from manufacturing states have been hardest hit by growing trade deficits and failed trade and investment deals. In , Donald Trump ran on a nationalist campaign platform, based in part on a critique of globalization that cited EPI research Trump Globalization is clearly an issue of bipartisan concern. It is time to consider a progressive alternative for rebuilding manufacturing. The components of such a plan are described in the following section. The coronavirus crisis has devastated the U.

Black, Latinx, and women workers have been hardest hit, and without special efforts made for low-income communities, they will be the last to recover Gould b.

With the economy in freefall, the U. In , roughly You need a Single Account for unlimited access. Full access to 1m statistics Incl. Single Account.

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Save statistic in. XLS format. PNG format. PDF format. Meanwhile, US manufacturing output grew only 0. Only in very recent years has manufacturing output returned to pre-recession levels. Similarly, US productivity growth in manufacturing also hit a nadir that decade, and remains at historically low levels. Most of the jobs that were lost were in the lower end of production, as opposed to higher skilled jobs.

In other words, one of the main routes into the American middle class just got cut off. This is a shocking state of affairs, considering how many advanced technologies originate in the US. If anything, African Americans and Hispanics got hit worse. That struggle won the election for Trump, [because it was felt by working class Democrats and Republicans]. The US remains the second-largest manufacturing country in the world, but its global dominance has been well and truly lost.

Production was the last thing we worried about [coming out of the Second World War], since we were the king. Nobody was remotely close to us. William B Bonvillian US manufacturing entered the Second World War far ahead of the competition, and by its end it was running laps around them. By resting on its laurels, therefore, the US lost its lead. Meanwhile, post-war Germany and Japan were rapidly rebuilding their industrial bases to counter mass unemployment.

These were dramatic innovations in the production process, much of which were funded, ironically, by US post-war reconstruction money, such as the Marshall Plan. But guess what?

China did the exact same thing. Both are very creative stages and are better done together. Technological innovations have made the US the economic behemoth that it is. In the first part of that decade, President Ronald Reagan oversaw a period of deep recession in which industrial sectors were hit particularly hard. The US factory had begun to hollow out. Financial markets put enormous pressure on large companies to get rid of their [US] workers and plants and move away from being vertically integrated companies in which everything took place within the company itself.

Companies such as Texas Instruments, Alcoa and DuPont had been examples of this all-encompassing model that had been commonplace in US manufacturing before the s financial crash hit. As a different financial system and type of lending emerged out of the recession and continued throughout the s, investment into vertically integrated models started to diminish.

This led to an extraordinary break-up, starting in the s, of the large and competent American industrial manufacturers. As technology adapted, it allowed for the engineer and technician to be stationed further apart. This move away from being a one-stop US manufacturing shop arguably tipped a domino over in the chain of industrial decline, and next to fall was innovation through manufacturing.

One US company that made a splash in innovative technology, however, and on a massive global scale, was Apple. Suzanne Berger So mammoth was the impact of Apple that it influenced not just the future of handheld technology, but it also created a blueprint that other American companies — which were looking to disrupt through innovation — largely followed. If Apple, the company that was dominating stock markets and largely considered to be heralding the dawning of a new era in innovation, was outsourcing its manufacturing, surely it was on to something?

The rest of this commodity activity could happen anywhere else in the world, wherever low wages were. That was the desirable model. Yet Berger cautions that this created an absence of real innovation within the US manufacturing industry. With the absence of a foot on the gas pedal to grow manufacturing workforces — and to do so with innovative practices at its heart — the US was unknowingly put on the back foot. First and foremost, China and Mexico.

William B Bonvillian The feasibility of reshoring factory jobs aside, Trump was in fact reacting to a very real issue. As already highlighted with the likes of DuPont and Apple, the heady combination of globalisation and economic progress has been a double-edged sword for the US economy and all countries for that matter.