Opinion | The Good Old Days of Manufacturing Are Long Gone
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are vowing to engineer a manufacturing renaissance.Such promises evoke 1950s-era memories of strong communities full of ordinary Americans, many without college degrees, earning attractive pay and benefits for their hard work.Manufacturing bottomed out at around 10 percent of nonfarm workers by 2019.
The numbers employed in manufacturing started to recover under President Biden and may continue to rebound.But what results from that growth won’t resemble these misty recollections.Many of those roles will need to be filled by immigrants.
In 1950, when manufacturing was near its peak as a share of total employment, the mostly male working population was growing at a steady clip, thanks in part to a fertility rate of 3.1 children per woman.The complexion of the working population and its growth rate has since changed.While women and immigrants helped offset the slowing growth of the native-born population, it hasn’t been enough: Two-thirds of respondents to a National Association of Manufacturing survey this past spring said that their biggest challenge was attracting and retaining employees.The industry group further expects that an additional 3.8 million manufacturing jobs will likely become available in the coming decade, both as older workers retire and as initiatives enacted in the Biden administration come online, including those tied to the energy transition and strengthening strategic industries such as semiconductors.
That will require coming administrations to depend even more on foreign-born workers in a virulently anti-immigrant climate.More extensive use of technology may also help fill the gap.Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Louis data.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience wh...