Ben Casselman writing for fivethirtyeight.com:
Since the recession ended in 2009, manufacturing output — the value of all the goods that U.S. factories produce, adjusted for inflation — has risen by more than 20 percent, because of a combination of “reshoring” and increased domestic demand. But manufacturing employment is up just 5 percent. And much of that job growth represents a rebound from the recession, not a sustainable trend.
And:
There’s no mystery why candidates love to focus on manufacturing and trade. The U.S. economy faces deep structural challenges — stagnant wages, rising inequality, falling employment rates among men and other groups — and China presents an easy scapegoat. (Wall Street often plays a similar role, especially on the Democratic side.) And manufacturing in particular embodies something that seems to be disappearing in today’s economy: jobs with decent pay and benefits available to workers without a college degree. The average factory worker earns more than $25 an hour before overtime; the typical retail worker makes less than $18 an hour.
But those factory photo ops ignore an important reality: In 1994 there were 3.5 million more Americans working in manufacturing than in retail. Today, those numbers have almost exactly reversed, and the gap is widening. More than 80 percent of all private jobs are now in the service sector.
There is nothing wrong with politicians’ trying to save what remains of U.S. manufacturing, nor with trying to avoid repeating old mistakes on trade. But like it or not, the U.S. is now a service-based economy. It’s time candidates started talking about making that economy work for workers, rather than pining for one that’s never coming back.
