Old-school manufacturing is gone and is not coming back

The president is fixated on bringing manufacturing back to the United States. The idea to “save manufacturing” makes for good sound bites but does not appreciate how much the US economy has changed from the time when manufacturing jobs were a central part of the workforce.

- Sheldon H. Jacobson, Tribune News Service

Looking more closely at US employment trends, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported over 19.5 million people employed in the manufacturing sector in 1979, representing over 20% of the workforce. That number dropped to around 12.8 million by 2019, or around 8.5% of the workforce. Notably, the US population in 1979 was 225 million people, compared with over 328 million people in 2019, an increase of over 45%. This means that the fraction of the working population engaged in manufacturing has been plummeting for 40 years.