What Donald Trump Gets Wrong About U.S. Manufacturing
One striking aspect of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent speech on the economy was its dire portrayal of the state of U.S. manufacturing.
Trump’s remarks conjured up a bleak landscape of shuttered factories and collapsing industrial might. “[T]owns once thriving and humming are now in a state despair,” declared Trump, citing the heavy loss of American manufacturing jobs over the last several decades.
Trump is right to say that U.S. manufacturing has changed dramatically. But his portrait of the industry is also overly negative and one-sided. The true picture is more complicated — but also more hopeful.
The number of manufacturing jobs has grown since 2010.
Trump correctly asserts that America has lost roughly a third of total manufacturing jobs since 1997. But he also failed to mention that this decline includes a precipitous drop in manufacturing employment during the Great Recession — and that manufacturing employment has been rebounding since 2010.
After hitting a low of 11.4 million jobs in 2010, manufacturing employment has since climbed to nearly 12.3 million in May 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The biggest recent hit to manufacturing jobs was the financial crisis and the recession — from 2008 to 2010 alone, manufacturing lost more than 2 million jobs.
America is still the world’s second largest manufacturer.
Despite what’s happened with manufacturing employment, the United States ranks number two globally in the total value of manufacturing output. As recently as 2009, America was number one. The following chart from the World Bank shows the relative positions of the United States, China, Japan and Germany in value-added manufacturing output.
U.S. manufacturing output, which also dropped during the recession, has been growing since 2010. But manufacturers are also continuing to show gains in productivity as robots and more efficient production processes take over human brute labor. As this chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve shows, real output per person has more than doubled in the manufacturing sector from 1988 to 2016.
The rise of automation, along with other gains in productivity, is a major reason why the sheer number of U.S. manufacturing jobs is unlikely to regain its post-World War II heyday, even if actual output continues to grow.
For example, NPR recently reported on booming demand in China for American-made New Balance sneakers, which are mostly manufactured in Maine. The two factories in Maine that produce more than 1 million sneakers a year employ a total of 650 workers (only a portion of whom work on the actual assembly line).
Manufacturing jobs have shifted from low-skilled to high-skilled.
The increasing use of advanced technology in manufacturing also means that the manufacturing jobs of today are vastly different from those of the 1950s and 1960s. Manufacturing workers today are far less likely to be standing on an assembly line turning bolts and far more likely to be operating complex machinery. American assembly lines are also far less likely to be churning out mass-produced consumer goods, such as T-shirts or sneakers, and more likely to be producing high-tech industrial goods. The Chicago-based manufacturer Cummins Allison, for example, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of ATMs and the cash counting machines used by banks and casinos.
According to the industry-linked Manufacturing Institute, the share of the manufacturing workforce with a bachelor’s degree has grown from 16.3% in 2000 to 19.9% in 2012, while the share of workers with less than a high school diploma has declined. It’s increasingly less possible to go straight from high school graduation to a factory floor.
Better-educated workers also mean better wages. In 2013, manufacturing workers’ pay averaged $33.93 per hour, according to industry data (although this figure also includes the salaries of management and administrative workers as well).
The industry argues, in fact, that it faces a serious shortage of workers — potentially as many as 2 million unfilled positions — because of an inadequate supply of workers with the right skills and interest in pursuing manufacturing as a career. In part due to dismal portrayals of U.S. manufacturing as sector that’s dirty, dangerous and dying, public polls find that many young people (and their parents) have no interest in manufacturing jobs for themselves — even though they support manufacturing as an important part of the U.S. economy.
Services, not manufacturing, drive the American economy today.
Apart from the lopsided portrayal of U.S. manufacturing, the biggest disservice done by Trump’s speech is his over-emphasis on manufacturing — which accounts for only about one-fifth of the overall U.S. economy. The vast majority of U.S. economic output is services — including knowledge-based sectors such as information technology, financial services, logistics and distribution, education, marketing, legal and a host of other high-end professional services where America has no equal.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) reports that the United States is far and way the global leader in services exports and in fact enjoys a trade surplus when it comes to exports. In 2013, America accounted for 14% of total global services exports, compared to 4% for China.
As nations grow wealthier and more advanced, their economies progress from being agriculture or resource-driven, to manufacturing, and then to services. China, in fact, is also shifting to a service-driven economy as its middle class grows, its population becomes more educated, and low-skilled manufacturing leaves for even lower-cost destinations like Malaysia.
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Politicians have long focused on the decline in manufacturing jobs as a proxy for the toll that globalization and advances in technology have had on American workers, especially those who are less educated and less equipped to succeed in a rapidly changing economy. These shifts have been particularly difficult for workers without at least some college education, especially men. In real terms, men with only a high school diploma are earning less today than they did in 1973.
But the right approach is not to turn back the clock, as Trump urges, and attempt to revive a 1950s-style economy. This task is not only impossible but undesirable. Rather, the right solution is to help all workers invest in the skills and education they need to compete in the changing economy. For all his bluster, Trump is silent on this most practical step for helping the workers left behind in the current economy and who are propelling his campaign for the White House.
Originally published at washingtonmonthly.com on June 29, 2016.
