Comeback in factory jobs is real and likely to grow [View all]

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Justin Fox / Bloomberg Opinion

For the first time since the late 1970s, U.S. employment in manufacturing has surpassed the peak set during the previous business cycle. This happened in May 2022, according to the revised 2022 payroll jobs data released last week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of January 2023, the sector employed just short of 13 million Americans on a seasonally adjusted basis, the biggest number since November 2008.

After shrinking for three decades, manufacturing employment in the U.S. appears to have returned to growth. In the 2010s, this may have looked suspiciously like a dead-cat bounce after a decade of steep declines, and the latest BLS employment projections still estimate that manufacturing employment will fall by 139,400 from 2021 to 2031. Now that we’re almost 13 years into the new growth trend, I’m thinking that may be too pessimistic.

It’s not as if manufacturing is suddenly where all the work is. The sector, which accounted for more than a third of American jobs during World War II and stayed above 30 percent for most of the 1950s, is now at 8.4 percent of payroll employment and shrinking slowly. That pace represents a drastic change from the long decline of the previous half century, though.

One explanation for this shift is that globalization, while perhaps not going into reverse, is no longer proceeding at anything like its pace of the 1990s and 2000s. Manufacturers have been reassessing the risks and rewards of having supply chains spread across the planet and “reshoring” some production closer to consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-comeback-in-factory-jobs-is-real-and-likely-to-grow/

Go dark Brandon!