The Grand Illusion
Manufacturing in the U.S. isn’t declining. In fact, total manufacturing output has increased by thirty percent over the past twenty years.
Figures from the Federal Reserve in St. Louis show that, even in the so-called “Rust Belt” (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), manufacturing output has increased by 14 percent over the last twenty years. In the south, output has increased 25 percent over the same period, while output has increased by 114 percent in Arizona, 78 percent in California, 70 percent in Oregon, and 39 percent in Colorado.
So why does everyone think the U.S. is manufacturing less?
The simple answer is that there are fewer jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing has dropped from roughly 16 million jobs in 2005 to 13 million at the end of 2024. At the same time, the hourly wage rate for manufacturing production workers has increased by 75%, but the cost of living has increased “officially” by 64% (I say “officially” because the official figures understate real inflation felt by most people).
At the same time, U.S. population rose from 296 million in 2005 to 347 million in 2025. So while the U.S. population increased by 51 million people, the number of manufacturing jobs dropped by 3 million. Put another way, one in eighteen Americans worked in manufacturing in 2005, but in 2025 only one in twenty-seven did.
All this translates into the facts that there are fewer manufacturing jobs, which on average pay in real terms about the same as they did twenty years ago. So those working in manufacturing, on average, haven’t seen significant improvement in real wages, and there are fewer jobs, largely because of greater technology and more automation. In addition, an increasing percentage of those jobs are requiring greater and greater skills.
This also suggests that increasing manufacturing in the United States won’t significantly increase the number of jobs being created, no matter what Trump and the Republicans claim.
The Republican goals are all mired deep in the past. In this case, they try to evoke the days of the post-WWII USA, when the other industrialized countries had been bombed just about into oblivion.
So, naturally, US manufacturing boomed, and the factory workers got great contracts, complete with pensions.
Do the oligarchs that run today’s Republican party want to pay their workers like that now? There’s nothing stopping them.
Not much of what the Republican party says makes sense when you think it through – which they depend on their base *not* to do.
It’s all about enriching the already-rich, including by removing all regulations to make them corporations act responsibly, by allowing the corporations to go back to polluting everything, to burning fossil fuels, you name it.
I am starting to trust the average person’s evaluation of the economy less and less. Their perspective seems to switch based on the party affiliation of administration in power. I feel like the economic hardship under the Biden years were largely imagined, given that things are worse under Trump and the public is dead silent about it.
I also think Americans have romanticized basic resource extraction and widget making over actual valuable end product manufacturing. We’ll kill a 100,000 jobs in the rest of the economy to save 1,000 coal mining jobs.
I don’t know how we can fix that though.
Rationality rarely comes into these debates. The right in Australia will do almost anything to protect 30,000 mining jobs, despite the fact that 750,000 tourism jobs in Queensland are put at risk by climate crisis damage to the Great Barrier Reef etc
That’s because “my job” or occupation is different. That’s almost always the case, even for writers, many of whom are screaming about the use of AI-generated content.
Also, a manufacturing job today is nothing like what it was in the 1950s. This is not the “you do one or two tasks over and over, and when 1,000 other people do their single task in sequence, a car or TV or piano or whatever comes out the other end.” That era is gone.
A dear friend of mine works in manufacturing. Her job? Directing a dozen or so robot arms. Double-check the inputs provided to her, make sure they go into the system correctly, hit “go”, and then harass logistics to make sure additional raw materials are being delivered properly and that the outputs get picked up for insertion into the distribution pipeline.
She and her robot arms are doing the work of a hundred people. And while she is doing all of this without a college degree, she has applied herself diligently and continuously for the past ten-plus years to make sure she has the knowledge and skills needed to operate the equipment.
That’s the reality of manufacturing in the 21st century.
Does she have to belong to a Union?
It seems to me that unionism is increasing again with some results similar to the 1950’s.
Starbuck workers need the theoretical protection of a union but your friend should be well paid and taken care of in other ways at work because; any mistake will not only reduce output for the business but the replacement cost for that sort of machine would be horrendous.
Depends on whether the companies today are more powerful vs the worker in question, as well as whether the power of the state will be used to the advantage of either party.
A union is still important IMO, particularly because of how employee costs are seen in most companies.