manufacturing employment

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

However, slower productivity growth rates were now faster than their corresponding industrial output growth rates, at 0.9 percent. The result was that manufacturing employment contracted rapidly, by 1.7 percent per year. Even before that contraction got going, deindustrialization had already technically begun: as soon as the rate of growth of manufacturing employment consistently fell below the rate of growth of the total workforce, the manufacturing employment share started its downward trend. Figure 2.1. French Manufacturing Sector, 1950–2017 Source: Conference Board, International Comparisons of Productivity and Unit Labour Costs, July 2018 edition.

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By the end of the twentieth century, it was possible to speak of a global wave of deindustrialization: worldwide manufacturing employment rose in absolute terms by 0.4 percent per year between 1991 and 2016, but that was much slower than the overall growth of the global labor force, with the result that the manufacturing share of total employment declined by 3 percentage points over the same period.24 China is a key exception, but only a partial one (Figure 2.3). In the mid 1990s, Chinese state-owned enterprises shed millions of workers, sending manufacturing-employment shares on a steady downward trajectory.25 China reindustrialized, in employment terms, starting in the early 2000s, but then it began to deindustrialize once again in the mid 2010s.

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See Sanjaya Lall, “The Technological Structure and Performance of Developing Country Manufactured Exports, 1985–98,” Oxford Development Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2000, pp. 337–69. 39 In poorer countries where the labor force is growing rapidly, the decline in manufacturing employment growth is typically relative rather than absolute. The manufacturing employment share declines even as its level grows. 40 See Gary Gereffi, “The Organization of Buyer-Driven Global Commodity Chains: How US Retailers Shape Overseas Production Networks,” in Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewics, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, Praeger, 1994.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States
by Bernadette Hanlon
Published 18 Dec 2009

Many of these bluecollar suburbs saw manufacturing employment decline on a dramatic scale, including Dixmoor outside Chicago, Trainer outside Philadelphia, 4 There were twenty-four in total, but four of these suburbs had very small populations (fewer than two hundred residents in 1980), which exaggerated the poverty-rate changes from 1980 to 2000. Declining Inner-Ring Suburbs / 77 Versailles outside Pittsburgh, and Riverview outside St. Louis. In the case of Riverview, for instance, the poverty rate increased from 6 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 2000. During the same period, manufacturing employment declined from 34 percent to 14 percent of total employment.

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Serverstal recently shutdown its Wheeling, West Virginia, plant, and, although there are no immediate plans to halt operations at Sparrows Point, the threat looms large. Unemployment in communities like Dundalk has been the downside of a more general decline in heavy industry. Dundalk has experienced dramatic declines in manufacturing employment, particularly since the 1970s. In 1970, about half of Dundalk’s workers were employed in manufacturing. By 2000, manufacturing employment had declined to just 16 percent of total employment. Unemployment rates were 6 percent for white males and more than 16 percent for African American males by 2000. As with many working-class inner-ring suburbs, Dundalk has experienced the effects of deindustrialization.

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Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the industrial and commercial base of this suburb began to decline, particularly with the erosion of steel and subsidiary industries throughout the Midwest. Hammond, along with the central city of Gary immediately to the east, is described as a “classic deindustrializing center,” characterized by declining manufacturing employment and decreasing population (Negrey and Zickel 1994). From 1980 to 2000, the population of Hammond declined by more than 10,000 people, a loss of more than one in ten residents. Hammond contrasts with the outer suburb of Schaumburg, also in the Chicago metropolitan area. This suburb has been identified as a major employment center (McDonald and Prather 1994).

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

Without a friction like tariffs to justify the onshore presence of manufacturing jobs, the production of many goods left US shores for China. The authors identify goods that used to be produced in the US, that were later imported from China. They find that the largest declines in manufacturing employment were felt in the production lines for these goods. That manufacturing value-added continued to rise despite the decline in manufacturing employment was caused by US companies engaging in cross-border reallocation of production and employment. Europe, on the other hand, had given China MFN status much earlier and did not see such declines in manufacturing after China joined the WTO.

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Presumably then, a relocation of manufacturing jobs from Europe (and others) to China had happened earlier, though likely at a much slower pace. Diagram 2.2“The surprisingly swift decline in US manufacturing employment” (Source Bureau of Economic Analysis) In a nutshell, China benefitted asymmetrically from WTO inclusion. Its entry on an MFN basis to the US market around the same time led to a decline in manufacturing employment there at a rate that had not been seen in previous decades. Both point to the conclusion that China’s labour force integrated with global capital and global trade in a very rapid manner, adding to the considerable demographic tailwinds from which the world was already benefitting.

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Manufacturing has been far more sensitive to economic conditions than services. Manufacturing firms thus participated to a greater extent in the investment downturn, with the share of manufacturing in total investment falling from 45% in the early 1980s to around 30% by 2002. Manufacturing employment has not been immune either. The share of manufacturing employment fell from around 28% in the late 1970s and 25% on the eve of the asset bust to just over 16% in 2017. On the evidence thus far, the conventional description of a corporate sector weighed down by the need to shed excess leverage and capacity paints a gloomy picture of corporate Japan.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

The story is a very different one in the 1970–90 period, when the process of economic restructuring and technological transformation which took place during these two decades led to a reduction of manufacturing employment in all countries (see tables 4.1–4.14 in Appendix A). However, while this trend was general, the shrinkage of manufacturing employment was uneven, clearly indicating the fundamental variety of social structures according to differences in economic policies and in firms’ strategies. Thus, while the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy experienced rapid de-industrialization (reducing the share of their manufacturing employment in 1970–90 from 38.7 to 22.5 percent; from 25.9 to 17.5 percent; from 27.3 to 21.8 percent, respectively), Japan and Germany reduced their share of manufacturing labor force moderately: from 26.0 to 23.6 percent in the case of Japan, and from 38.6 percent to a still rather high level of 32.2 percent in 1987 in the case of Germany.

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I have chosen to elaborate on the basis of the 1987 projection because, while being equally reliable, it is more detailed in its breakdown by industries and reaches out to 2005.17 The most significant feature of these projections is the slow decline of manufacturing employment in Japan in spite of the acceleration of the transformation of Japan into an informational society. In the 1987 statistical projection, manufacturing employment stood at 25.9 percent in 1985 and was projected to remain at 23.9 percent of total employment in 2005. As a reminder, in the US projection, manufacturing employment was expected to decline from 17.5 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005, a much sharper decline from a substantially lower base.

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I understand obviously by such terms the massive decline of agricultural employment in the first case and the rapid decline of manufacturing employment in the second period. Indeed, all G-7 countries maintained or increased (in some cases substantially) the percentage of their employment in transformative activities and in manufacturing between 1920 and 1970. Thus, if we exclude construction and utilities in order to have a sharper view of the manufacturing labor force, England and Wales decreased only slightly the level of their manufacturing labor force from 36.8 percent in 1921 to 34.9 percent in 1971; the United States increased manufacturing employment from 24.5 percent in 1930 to 25.9 percent in 1970; Canada from 17.0 percent in 1921 to 22.0 percent in 1971; Japan saw a dramatic increase in manufacturing from 16.6 percent in 1920 to 26.0 percent in 1970; Germany (although with a different national territory) increased its manufacturing labor force from 33 to 40.2 percent; France, from 26.4 to 28.1 percent; and Italy, from 19.9 to 27.4 percent.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

By wiping out large numbers of field jobs, the 1944 invention of the cotton-picker caused millions of African Americans to move from rural parts of the old Confederacy to northern cities, seeking manufacturing employment. The changing sociology of Chicago’s South Side, which would produce wonderful blues music, awful gun crime, and America’s first black president, is recounted in one of the best books of the twentieth century, The Promised Land by Nicholas Lemann. As agricultural employment entered precipitous decline owing to mechanized harvesting, farm-country residents were viewed as without hope. Instead it turned out that manufacturing employment paid a lot better than farm work, while the new factory jobs opening up were closer to the educational institutions essential for modern self-advancement.

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Campaigning, Trump and Sanders told audiences that millions of American jobs had been “lost” to China. These jobs cannot be found in China, or anywhere, because they no longer exist—automation and productivity improvements are larger influences than trade in manufacturing employment trends, in Asia as well as in the West. The rise of manufacturing employment in China probably is over— Chinese econometric data is unreliable—with a drop in Chinese factory jobs likely soon, if not already in progress. If China had American-style elections, candidates there would shake their fists about jobs “lost” to the United States.

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When Trump and Sanders made jobs “lost” to China a leading issue of the 2016 election, opinion writers and politicians embraced research by the economist David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His studies demonstrate that American manufacturing employment has declined by 1.5 million jobs because of international trade. That’s about 13 percent of current US manufacturing employment, roughly the conclusion reached by the Ball State study. Autor got more attention because he focused on gloom, while Ball State highlighted the overall health of the manufacturing sector. Data in the MIT job loss study stop at 2007, which is significant because that is roughly when Chinese industrial employment, too, started downward.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun
Published 16 Oct 2017

According to Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist of the World Bank, “Having itself been a ‘follower goose,’ China is on the verge of graduating from low-skilled manufacturing jobs and becoming a ‘leading dragon.’ That will free up nearly 100 million labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, enough to more than double manufacturing employment in low-income countries.”9 To put that further into perspective, when the United States reached its peak in manufacturing employment, in 1978, only 20 million Americans were working in factories.10 Now five times that number are about to come out of a single country: China. This flood of jobs coming out of China matches Africa’s current demographic moment.

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Firms During Leaders’ Summit,” Washington Post, August 5, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-announces-more-investment-in-africa-by-us-firms/2014/08/05/bb3a9e98-1cd5-11e4-82f9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html. 34. Stephen Gordon, “A Little Context on the Decline of Manufacturing Employment in Canada,” Maclean’s, February 12, 2013, http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/some-context-for-the-decline-in-canadian-manufacturing-employment/, based on data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED database. 35. Dani Rodrik, “On Premature Deindustrialization,” Dani Rodrik’s weblog, October 11, 2013, http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2013/10/on-premature-deindustrialization.html. 36.

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By contrast, the $14 billion of US private sector investment in Africa announced by the Obama administration in August 2014 focuses primarily on banking, construction, and information technology.33 That is for good reason: after decades of relocating their factories to developing countries, the United States and other developed nations have very little manufacturing left to offshore. In Europe, Japan, and North America, the manufacturing share of employment has steadily declined from the 20–40 percent range in 1970 to half that figure in 2012.34 Other than China, most developing countries never had that much to begin with: Brazil’s peak in share of manufacturing employment was 16 percent in 1986; India hit its peak at just 13 percent, in 2002.35 Only China has enough of a manufacturing sector left to offshore, and much of that appears to be moving to Africa. … But how could this be? Why would manufacturing in Africa, an industry that by all measures died a generation ago, be attracting so much investment today?

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

In this and the following chapters, I explain that the answer is no. It was not “others” who unraveled the social contract of Western countries; that was the result of technological forces at work everywhere, and of domestic policy mistakes that varied in nature and degree from one country to another. FIGURE 2.2. US manufacturing employment (seasonally adjusted monthly figures). Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, via https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pP4Y. The kernel of truth at the heart of these betrayal stories, however, is that factory jobs (and the related jobs I mentioned) have indeed been disappearing in the West.

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Far from weakening the economic explanation of these movements, a closer look at their history strengthens it. We tend to forget that the political reaction to the end of the postwar period of broad-based economic progress was immediate and fierce, at least in Europe. In the last chapter, I identified the beginning of the end of the economy of belonging with the secular turn in manufacturing employment in the West in the 1970s. And sure enough, the 1980s was when some of today’s strongest illiberal populist movements first came into their own. Parties like France’s National Front, the Freedom Party of Austria, and Norway’s Progress Party made their first big inroads into the mainstream parties’ earlier electoral dominance shortly after industrial employment began to decline.

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In conjunction with the disappearance of union-regulated factory jobs, this has naturally made insecure work more prevalent. The level of insecurity can be measured by how much incomes typically fluctuate. The United States has seen two big jumps in the volatility of earnings, first from the 1970s to the 1980s—corresponding to the onset of manufacturing employment’s decline—and then during the 2008–9 Great Recession. In the United Kingdom today, large monthly pay fluctuations are shockingly common: three-quarters of people in regular jobs see their monthly pay fall by more than 5 per cent at least once a year. The average decrease in a month where pay falls is 290 pounds—more than the average UK household’s monthly grocery bill.

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success
by Dietrich Vollrath
Published 6 Jan 2020

The estimated effects from Autor, Dorn, and Hanson suggest that between 1990 and 2000, trade lowered manufacturing employment by 548,000, and between 2000 and 2007 by another 982,000. In total, we could attribute about 1.53 million lost manufacturing jobs to trade. For comparison, between 2000 and 2007 the total number of manufacturing jobs fell by around 3.5 million, so that trade could account for about 43% of that decline. Over the longer period from 1990 to 2007, Autor, Dorn, and Hanson calculate that trade accounted for about 21% of the decline in manufacturing employment. Over either period, trade with China had a significant effect on manufacturing employment. In addition, these direct losses also led to indirect losses of employment in these commuting zones.

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If we take Autor, Dorn, and Hanson’s numbers seriously, let’s say that with a different trade policy we could have had 1.53 million extra manufacturing workers in 2015. In reality, there were about 12.3 million manufacturing workers that year, so our hypothetical trade policy would have raised manufacturing employment by about 12%. With more manufacturing workers, the production of manufactured goods would have been higher as well, accounting for a larger percentage of GDP. Ignoring the fact that simply raising manufacturing employment by 12% would not by itself raise production by 12%—remember those elasticities we talked about in chapter 4—let’s assume that manufacturing production does go up by 12% in response.

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So if we were to incorporate the entire effect of trade, we’d most likely find that it had a positive but negligible effect on growth in human capital. Leaving aside the stock of human capital, the employment effects of trade with China could influence productivity through the allocation of workers between industries. What Autor, Dorn, and Hanson show is that China lowered manufacturing employment and, to a lesser extent, employment in other industries. The distinct effect on manufacturing means that China contributed to the decline in the share of employment in that industry and the share of manufacturing in total GDP. Recall from chapter 7 that manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from about 17.6% in 1990 to 12.2% by 2015, and relative to many other industries that expanded their share, manufacturing had relatively high productivity growth.

Social Democratic America
by Lane Kenworthy
Published 3 Jan 2014

No, it isn’t. As figure 4.22 shows, since the 1970s, manufacturing employment has been shrinking steadily in all rich nations. As in agriculture, this employment decline is due partly to automation. It owes also to the availability of low-cost production in poorer nations. Neither is likely to abate. Two decades from now, manufacturing jobs will have shrunk to less than 10 percent of employment in most affluent countries. Here in the United States, they may well be less than 5 percent. FIGURE 4.22 Manufacturing employment Manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. The lines are loess curves.

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Another disadvantage for the lower-income population is that in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States began incarcerating more young men, many for minor offenses. Having a criminal record makes it more difficult to get a stable job with decent pay.51 A number of developments, including technological advances, globalization, a loss of manufacturing employment, and the decline of unions, have reduced the number of jobs that require limited skills but pay a middle-class wage—the kind of jobs that once lifted poorer Americans into the middle class.52 Finally, changes in partner selection have widened the opportunity gap. Not only do those from better-off families tend to end up with more schooling and higher-paying jobs.

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London: Resolution Foundation. Pew Research Center. 2011a. “The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election.” Washington, DC. Pew Research Center. 2011b. “Public Wants Changes in Entitlements, Not Changes in Benefits.” Washington, DC. Pierce, Justin R. and Peter K. Schott. 2012. “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment.” Working Paper 18655. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Pierson, Paul. 1994. Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Piore, Michael J. and Charles F. Sabel. 1984. The Second Industrial Divide.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

A 1980s supercomputer (for example, the Cray supercomputer, costing over $20 million in today’s dollars) was room-sized and had speeds inferior to today’s iPhone.9 In the course of one generation, workplaces have been transformed almost beyond recognition; automation and computing have had dramatic effects on manufacturing jobs. As technology has spread and become less expensive, each manufacturing worker can produce a far larger quantity of goods. Since 1987, manufacturing output has increased by 83 percent, even as manufacturing employment has fallen by 29 percent. Figure 4.3: Manufacturing Output Increases as Manufacturing Employment Falls Numbers are indexed such that 2009 = 100. Data source: Federal Reserve. Studies suggest that one result of this technological change has been to dramatically reduce the number of workers required in manufacturing in the United States.

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Typically, manufacturing workers are both older and less educated than workers in other sectors, and this make job loss especially painful, since finding new jobs at similar wages is harder for older and less-educated workers. There is some evidence that workers in sectors with more import competition have both lower reemployment rates after job losses and greater earnings losses when they do find new jobs.3 However, since domestic competition and technological change can also reduce manufacturing employment, it is difficult to pin down the precise degree to which manufacturing job losses can be attributed to increased imports. Recently, a flurry of important studies have focused on quantifying the contribution of trade shocks to manufacturing job loss. For example, David Autor and his coauthors find that those commuting zones (clusters of counties that together constitute labor markets) where trade with China has increased most are the same zones in which job losses have been largest and wage growth has been most anemic.4 They conclude that the shock associated with Chinese trade is large.

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Feenstra, Hong Ma, and Yuan Xu, “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States: Comment,” UC Davis, 2017; David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H, Hanson, “Response to Robert Feenstra, Hong Ma, and Yuan Xu’s Comment on Autor, Dorn, and Hanson,” MIT, 2017. 3.  See similar arguments with Paul Krugman, “Trade and Jobs: A Note,” Blog, Opinion: New York Times, July 3, 2016. 4.  See Robert C. Feenstra, Hong Ma, and Yuan Xu, “US Exports and Employment,” UC Davis, 2017. 5.  See Ildiko Magyari, “Reorganization, Chinese Imports, and US Manufacturing Employment,” Columbia University Working Paper, January 2017. Recent research reveals that the response to Trump’s anti–Trade stance isn’t an anomaly.6 Well before his election, in the first decade of this century, areas of the United States that imported relatively high volumes of Chinese goods disproportionately voted moderate representatives out of office, in favor of ideologically extreme candidates of both parties.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

From being an industry so unimportant that it was not even reported separately in the 1900 census, automobiles became the largest manufacturing industry in 1940. Employment in automobiles grew 765 percent faster than total manufacturing employment over the first three decades after the industry emerged.82 To put this figure in perspective, employment in semiconductors grew 121 percent faster than the overall manufacturing employment in the three decades after its invention in 1958.83 Research by Alexopoulos and Cohen affirms the general perception that motor vehicles boosted employment more than other technologies.84 And their employment contributions extended far beyond the auto industry.

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That way lies dry rot. We must ever go on, fearlessly scrapping old methods and old machines as fast as we find them obsolete.6 Hardly any serious commentator argued in favor of slowing down the pace of mechanization, despite the sense that manufacturing employment was beginning to wane. Two new sources of productivity data, published in May 1927 and suggesting that manufacturing employment had fallen between 1919 and 1925, had sparked the technological unemployment debates. During the 1927 December meetings of the American Economic Association, the newly compiled data naturally became a subject of intense debate.

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Agglomeration, in short, comes down to the desire to reduce the costs of moving goods, people, and ideas.28 Of course, the cost of transporting goods has become a much less important factor in where companies chose to locate, simply because shipping has become so much cheaper. One reason why industrial cities like Detroit began to decline before the age of automation, when manufacturing employment was still expanding, is that production began to move away from the Great Lakes to right-to-work states in the Sunbelt, where union security agreements between companies and labor unions are prohibited.29 Such locational freedom, however, may have reduced the desire to transport the smart people and ideas that have become so valuable in the higher-tech economy.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

As a share of all workforce jobs in the UK, it fell from 8.2 percent in June 2010 to 7.7 percent in the latest data. Chancellor Osborne didn’t keep his promises. There has been no march of the makers, just a march of the unemployed ex-makers. In the United States, manufacturing employment in January 2019 was 12.8 million, down from 14 million in January 2007. Manufacturing employment was 9.9 percent of total non-farm employment in December 2007 versus 8.5 percent in 2019. Coal-mining jobs are down over the same period by a third and in January 2019 there were 52,700 miners, up from 50,800 in January 2017. Cut Government Budgets and Lay People Off until They Get Jobs The slowness of recovery from the Great Recession in large part is explained by the misplaced imposition of reckless austerity.

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Becker and his colleagues found that fundamental characteristics of the voting population were key drivers of the Vote Leave share, especially their age and education profiles, the historical importance of manufacturing employment, and low income and high unemployment. Migration was relevant only as it pertained to Eastern European countries, not older EU states or non-EU countries. The severity of fiscal cuts, which largely reflect weak fundamentals, they found, were also associated with Vote Leave. They also obtained similar findings at the much finer level of wards within cities. Importantly, Becker and coauthors found areas with a strong tradition of manufacturing employment were more likely to vote Leave, as well as areas with relatively low pay and high unemployment.

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Of particular concern is that among the white prime age (35-54) with no college education, 14 percent said this in 2019. This is precisely the group that has had disproportionately high rates of deaths of despair—from suicide, and drug and alcohol poisoning. We also found that a decline in the percentage of manufacturing employment, which has been on a steady march downward since its peak of 39.8 percent in 1944 to 8.6 percent in August 2020 (up a little from 8.5 percent at the start of 2017), has raised whites’ levels of distress and despair but has had no impact on non-whites. In 2021 and beyond, distress is inevitably going to worsen, especially for the most vulnerable, for all races.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

Michael Spence, in his brilliant book The Next Convergence, explains how the integration of global markets is leading to enormous dislocations, especially in labor markets.27 The factor price equalization story yields a testable prediction: American manufacturers would be expected to shift production overseas, where costs are lower. And indeed manufacturing employment in the United States has fallen over the past twenty years; economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson estimate that competition from China can explain about a quarter of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment.28 However, when one looks more closely at the data, the globalization story becomes much less compelling. Since 1996, manufacturing employment in China itself has actually fallen as well, coincidentally by an estimated 25 percent.29 That’s over thirty million fewer Chinese workers in that sector, even while output soared by 70 percent.

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(BEA) business: burdens and mandates on computer use in; see also information technology (IT) Moore’s Law in process changes in regulation of robot use in; see also automation see also manufacturing business cycles Busque, Leah Byrne, Donald California, University of, at Berkeley call centers Canada, immigrant entrepreneurship in Capek, Karel capital: bargaining power associated with intangible labor’s replacement by nonhuman capital, human see also superstars capital, organizational capitalism Card, David Carlsberg breweries Carnegie Mellon University Case, Steve Cato Institute Cavallo, Alberto Center for American Progress Chesky, Brian chess Chetty, Raj Chile, immigrant entrepreneurship in China: automation in capitalism in manufacturing employment in Chinn, Menzie choice modeling Christmas Carol, A (Dickens) Chunara, Rumi Churchill, Winston circuits, integrated Cisco Systems cities, plunder and conquest of Clark, John Bates Clarke, Arthur C. Cleveland Clinic Clifton, Jim Clinton, Bill cochlear implants Cohen, Jared Cohen, Peter Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) Columbus, Christopher Coming Apart (Murray) Coming Jobs War, The (Clifton) Commerce Department, U.S.

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Topalov, Veselin TopCoder traffic congestion translation services, online transportation Trebek, Alex tribbles TripAdvisor Tufano, Peter TurboTax tweets Twitter United Airlines United Kingdom, immigrant entrepreneurship in United Nations United States: average workweek in college students in Earned Income Tax Credit in education in financial hardship in GDP growth in Great Recession’s effects on immigration reform in income distribution in income guarantee plans in infrastructure in intellectual property regime in life expectancy in living standard in manufacturing employment in mid-1990s productivity increase in patenting in political inequality in post-1970 productivity decline in post-2000 productivity growth in productivity improvement in social mobility in tax rates in tax system in traffic congestion in unemployment in workforce in Urban Dictionary uShip value-added tax (VAT) Varian, Hal Velodyne Venkatraman, Venkat Victorians, educational system of Vinge, Vernor visas, H1–B vision, computer-aided Voltaire Wadhwa, Vivek wages: decoupling of productivity from globalization and immigration’s effect on in manufacturing Power Law distributions in relative performance determinants of spread in; see also “winner-take-all” markets see also income Wagner, Kyle Waldfogel, Joel Wales, Jimmy Wall Street Journal Walmart Walton, Sam Watson Watson, Thomas, Sr.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.

. (© Detroit News) 8.2 Republican Mayor Albert Cobo inaugurated for his third term, January 1954 (© Detroit News) 8.3 Thomas Poindexter and members of the Greater Detroit Home Owners’ Association present Home Owners’ Rights Ordinance petitions to the city clerk, June 1964 (© Detroit News) 9.1 Handbill calling an emergency meeting to protest the purchase of a home by African Americans in the Courville area of Detroit’s Northeast Side, 1950 (courtesy of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs) 9.2 1920s-era bungalow on Tuller Street in the De Witt–Clinton neighborhood in the Wyoming Corridor (author’s photograph) 10.1 Looting on Twelfth Street on the first day of the Detroit uprising of 1967 (© Detroit News) Maps 1.1 Detroit, 1940 2.1 Detroit’s Black Neighborhoods, 1940 7.1 (a) Black Population in Detroit, 1940 7.1 (b) Black Population in Detroit, 1950 7.1 (c) Black Population in Detroit, 1960 7.1 (d) Black Population in Detroit, 1970 7.2 (a) Detroit’s Black Population by Median Income, 1950 7.2 (b) Detroit’s Black Population by Median Income, 1960 7.2 (c) Detroit’s Black Population by Median Income, 1970 9.1 Defended and Undefended Neighborhoods Tables 1.1 Detroit’s Population, 1910–1970 4.1 Black Workers in Detroit-Area Automobile Plants, 1960 4.2 Black Workers in Selected Detroit-Area Steel Plants, 1965 4.3 Black Enrollment in Apprenticeship Programs in Detroit, 1957–1966 5.1 Automation-Related Job Loss at Detroit-Area Ford Plants, 1951–1953 5.2 Decline in Manufacturing Employment in Detroit, 1947–1977 5.3 Percentage of Men between Ages 15 and 29 Not in Labor Force, Detroit, 1960 5.4 Building Permits Issued for Factories and Shops, Detroit, 1951–1963 5.5 Joblessness in Detroit, 1950–1980 7.1 Black Household Income in Census Tracts with More than 500 Blacks, Detroit, 1950 and 1960 9.1 Housing and Employment Characteristics, Defended and Undefended Neighborhoods, Detroit, 1940 and 1950 10.1 High-Poverty Tracts in Detroit, 1970 and 1980 10.2 Joblessness in Detroit’s High-Poverty Areas, 1970 and 1980 B.1 Black Male Occupational Distribution in Detroit, 1940–1970 B.2 Black Female Occupational Distribution in Detroit, 1940–1970 B.3 Index of Relative Concentration of Black Males in Detroit by Occupation, 1940–1970 B.4 Index of Relative Concentration of Black Females in Detroit by Occupation, 1940–1970 P.1 In the years leading up to Detroit’s bankruptcy, the city’s civic infrastructure collapsed because of inadequate city, state, and federal funding.

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In addition, Detroit was home to a wide range of other industries, including chemicals, steel, pharmaceuticals, construction, and brewing, in which the dynamics of economic restructuring and race played out in ways that allow for comparisons with other cities.23 To view Detroit (or any place) as typical would be erroneous. Much about the city’s economy, most notably its dependence on manufacturing employment, distinguished it from other cities with more diverse economic bases. Detroit was not a global city like New York or Los Angeles, where in the 1970s and 1980s, a large, internationally linked information and service sector emerged to replace manufacturing jobs. And in some cities, most notably New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the presence of other minority groups, particularly Hispanics and Asians, complicated racial politics in ways that diverge from the experience of Detroit, which had a small Mexican-American population, a tiny Asian enclave, and hardly any Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, or Cubans.

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Suppliers and machine tool companies, and other smaller operations, fanned out throughout the city, generally within short range of auto plants, but not confined to the riverside or to railroad rights-of-way.5 In the early 1940s, Detroit was at its industrial zenith, leading the nation in economic escape from the Great Depression. Between 1940 and 1947, manufacturing employment in Detroit increased by 40 percent, a rate surpassed only by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Demand for heavy industrial goods skyrocketed during World War II, and Detroit’s industrialists positioned themselves to take advantage of the defense boom. Detroit’s automobile manufacturers, led by Ford, quickly converted their assembly lines to the mass production of military hardware, airplanes, tanks, and other vehicles, making metropolitan Detroit one of the birthplaces of the military-industrial complex.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

In the typical family, parents expected their children to be twice as well off as they were, just because they lived in America. In the fall of 1978, manufacturing employment reached its peak, with almost 20 million Americans working in factories. That year Jimmy Carter was president, Grease was the top-grossing movie, and the soap opera Dallas was transfixing TV viewers of all stripes. The economy did well that fall, logging a solid expansion in both gross domestic product (GDP) and jobs. Then suddenly the engine stopped. Manufacturing employment, the workhorse that had single-handedly pulled America from the uncertainties of the Great Depression to the stability of the postwar years, slowed down, then stopped, then began to move backward.

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But recessions and expansions are short-run phenomena. Their ups and downs have always occurred and always will. They are just a small part of the picture. Far more important—and interesting—are the longer-term trends that ultimately determine our standard of living. Lately we have seen some signs that the long decline in manufacturing employment might be slowing down. Wages in China have been creeping up, a predictable effect of increased prosperity. China’s move to revalue its currency, the yuan, has further increased labor costs from the perspective of American companies. General Electric has reopened an appliances factory in Kentucky after years overseas.

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All these signs have generated a growing perception among pundits and commentators that the U.S. manufacturing sector is about to turn a page and experience a renaissance. Yet while all of these examples make compelling media stories, they are not representative. They capture our attention precisely because they are exceptions that buck the trend.1 The perception of a forthcoming manufacturing comeback was further bolstered by unexpected gains in manufacturing employment in 2011, the first time in many years that production jobs grew in a significant way. But the reality is that the gains in 2011, while certainly welcome news, came after much worse than usual job losses during the recession years of 2008 and 2009. Looking forward, there is little to suggest that the long-run downward trajectory that we saw in Figure 1 is about to change in a permanent way.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

The impact on factory employment was dramatic. The new technological impulse has been a massive and sustained push factor—pushing workers out of manufacturing in advanced economies. In all advanced economies, the share of jobs in manufacturing has been on a “mission to zero” since the 1970s, as Figure 3.1 shows. Manufacturing employment shares in the United States fell from 30 percent in the 1970s to something like 10 percent in the 2010s. The United Kingdom’s industrial sector, which used to absorb over a third of workers, now accounts for only one in ten jobs. The manufacturing share in Germany halved from 40 percent to 20 percent, and Japan’s declined from 27 percent to 17 percent.

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Incomes soared on the back of technological progress and expanding trade—especially for the middle class. FDR’s “forgotten” men and women were forgotten no longer. They saw life-changing increases in living standards, financial security, and economic prospects. This happy position started to slip in the 1970s as the nature of technological progress changed. Manufacturing employment in the US peaked in 1979. Due to automation, it has trended downward ever since. And then came the new globalization around 1990. This tipped rich nations’ share of world manufacturing into a steep decline—one that continues today. The massive economic transformation that came with ICT-led automation and globalization—above all the deindustrialization and slow growth—produced a backlash and unfocused calls for shelter from the shocks.

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If Perry follows the average trajectory of US workers with his skill level, his future could hold some very dark moments. During the Services Transformation, automation and globalization eliminated good jobs for low education workers. It was the start of what might be called the “wretched ratchet.” Manufacturing employment jagged down with each recession and recovered with each recovery, but each time the recovery high was lower than the previous peak. Since 1979, the number of US manufacturing jobs has been on a bumpy, downward slide. Deindustrialization also raised the stakes in terms of education. Many of the children of the displaced factory workers got university educations to train for service-sector jobs.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford
Published 1 Jan 2006

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the pace of abandonment quickened, leaving a gloomy assortment of empty mills, especially in the older cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Between 1947 and 1967, New York City lost 175,000 manufacturing jobs, but from 1967 to 1977 manufacturing employment dropped an additional 286,000. From 1950 to 1967, the number of manufacturing jobs in Boston fell 21 percent; between 1967 and 1977, the loss was 36 percent. Philadelphia lost 40 percent of its manufacturing employment between 1967 and 1977, and the rate of decline in New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo was between 30 and 36 percent.15 Shuttered factories were increasingly familiar sights in America’s urban hubs, testifying to the industrial decline of the central city.

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, low-rise office buildings and landscaped office parks were appearing along the metropolitan fringe throughout the United States. From 1959 to 1965 the number of office jobs in Long Island’s Nassau County soared 41 percent, as compared with a 20 percent rise in manufacturing employment. In Southfield, Michigan, the home of Northland Shopping Center, corporate offices were also providing jobs for suburbanites. In 1955 Bendix Corporation built its general offices and research center in the Detroit suburb, and later in the 1950s Standard Oil and Reynolds Aluminum constructed low-rise regional headquarters.

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Between 1970 and 1982, the number of households with only one or two persons increased almost threefold and accounted for 55 percent of the nation’s households by the early 1980s.7 In other words, the number of Americans who needed a multibedroom house in suburbia with yard space for a swing set and access to good education was not increasing as rapidly as was the population of young, childless individuals who were more likely to know the location of singles bars than schools. Another factor encouraging gentrification was the increase in white-collar jobs in the central cities. Manufacturing employment continued to plummet as blue-collar jobs moved to the suburbs, to smaller communities in the South, or out of the country or simply yielded to automation. Between 1977 and 1987, New York City lost 232,000 manufacturing jobs. Yet New York’s overall private-sector employment rose 342,000, with the finance and business services category making up 70 percent of the increase.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

If previous periods of industrialisation at least had the benefit of providing enough factory jobs for the new proletariat, premature deindustrialisation threatens to eliminate this traditional pathway entirely. Technological and economic developments now enable countries to virtually leapfrog the industrialisation phase, which means that developing economies are now deindustrialising at much lower rates of per capita income and with much lower shares of manufacturing employment.106 China is a good example of this, with manufacturing employment in decline,107 labour struggles becoming more confident,108 real wages surging109 and demographic limits leading to a focus on ‘technological upgrading [and] productivity enhancements’ in order to maintain growth.110 The automation of factories is at the leading edge of this deindustrialisation trend, with China already the biggest purchaser of industrial robots, and expected to soon have more industrial robots in operation than either Europe or North America.111 The factory of the world is going robotic.

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Deindustrialisation can also be seen in ‘reshoring’, where manufacturing returns to developed economies in jobless, automated forms.112 These deindustrialisation trends are taking hold across the developing economies of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and most of Asia.113 Even in countries where manufacturing employment has increased in absolute terms, there have been significant decreases in the labour-intensity of the process.114 The result of all of this is not only an incomplete transition to a significant working class, but also the stymying of the expected employment path for the workforce. Premature deindustrialisation is leaving most of the world’s urban proletariat dispossessed of its agricultural livelihood and without the opportunity to be hired for manufacturing jobs.

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Skilled workers became increasingly necessary in overseeing the new machines, carrying out expanding service work, and managing the increasingly large firms that were emerging.14 The need for skilled labour was further amplified in the early twentieth century by the rise of office technologies – typewriters, photocopiers, and so on – that required relatively well-educated operators. In other words, technology is not uniformly deskilling, and the increased demand for skilled labour over the past century testifies to that.15 Over this period, manufacturing employment continued to decline, due to its susceptibility to productivity-enhancing technology.16 The automation of mass-production manufacturing in the early twentieth century was eventually extended, with the automation of small-batch manufacturing.17 While the industrial sector employed 1,000 robots in 1970, today it uses over 1.6 million robots.18 In terms of employment, manufacturing has reached a global saturation point.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

According to this school of thought, advanced countries cannot live by services alone, not least because services have less export potential than manufactures. So a shrinking manufacturing base must be equated with national decline, as must the growing financialisation of the economy. No surprise, then, that the decline in manufacturing employment in the UK, from 31 per cent of the workforce in 1975 to 25 per cent in 1983 to 8 per cent today, causes much angst, as does the almost-as-severe percentage fall in the US, where manufacturing employment is down to 9 per cent. Unfavourable comparisons are made with Germany and Japan, where manufacturing constitutes a much bigger part of the economy and contributes consistently to large trade surpluses.

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This belief in the intrinsic merits of manufacturing is perhaps understandable, given that manufacturing was – and still is, in the developing world – responsible for raising the great mass of people out of poverty. It is an overwhelmingly powerful truth that manufacturing secured the triumph of capitalism. Yet, as I will show, it is arguable that manufacturing employment ought to fall in a mature economy; and one of the safest predictions for the twenty-first century is that in the developed world it will continue to do so without causing a collapse in living standards. To make this case is admittedly quite a challenge, because the prejudice about the superiority of manufacturing over services has deep historical roots.

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Yet despite its strong position, dealing with hundreds of companies in a global market, it employs all of seven people. Nor, incidentally, is the reduced capacity of manufacturing to generate jobs purely an advanced-country characteristic. Even in China, where the manufacturing sector contributes 33 per cent of GDP, manufacturing employment is now below its level in the late 1990s. Perhaps the biggest impetus behind the decline of manufacturing in the advanced economies is globalisation. In effect, developed countries have been outsourcing their manufacturing to China and other emerging markets that are now going through the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation that characterises the early stages of capitalist development, in which very low labour costs create comparative advantage.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

The picture is the same in higher-valued services, where technology is devised and refined, translating innovation into goods and services yielding productivity gains.28 The erosion is also reflected in manufacturing employment, which peaked at 19,426,000 in 1979 on the eve of President Reagan’s election. There was a 41 percent decline in manufacturing jobs thereafter, to fewer than 11,500,000 by early 2010, before turning up a bit with the recovery. Manufacturing employment was actually lower in 2009 than in 1941 prior to Pearl Harbor, or in any year in between. The thinning out of manufacturing employment was intense. Writing about the middle years (1984–1986) of the Reagan administration, Peter Peterson noted: “Over the past three years America’s import deluge has resulted in pink slips for one to two million domestic manufacturing workers each year.

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Indeed, one study in December 2012 by Justin R. Pierce of the Federal Reserve System and Yale management professor Peter K. Schott attribute the loss of as many as 4 million US manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007 to the new certainty provided by PNTR. Utilizing census data, they concluded: “Absent the shift in US policy, US manufacturing employment would have risen nearly 10 percent between 2001 and 2007, versus an actual decline of more than 15 percent.”9 The second example is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted earlier in the Clinton administration (1993). A key provision forced Mexico to guarantee that foreign investors for the first time could actually own a majority controlling interest in domestic factories.

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More than a third of them remain indefinitely out of work; more than half of the rest have taken pay cuts of 30 to 50 percent in new jobs that cannot make use of their experience.”29 In that same year, Paul Kennedy prophetically wrote: “In terms of commercial expertise, levels of training and education, efficiency of production, standards of income … the ‘number-one’ power of 1900 seemed to be losing its position, with dire implications for the country’s long-term strategic position.”30 Employment in manufacturing is cyclical, but each upturn in the macroeconomy during the Reagan decline has featured disproportionate job loss in the manufacturing sector. During the recent recession, manufacturing employment fell nearly 29 percent through October 2009, over five-fold faster than the pace of job loss across all sectors.31 Once such jobs are gone, as economist Nancy Folbre explained earlier, firms have mostly proven loathe to recreate high-value manufacturing jobs at home, and thus the losses become permanent.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

Pierce and Schott argued the decision to grant that status on a permanent basis in 2000 removed an important uncertainty, catalyzing increased capital and trade flows. See their “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment,” American Economic Review 106, no. 7 (2016). 92. In the early 2000s, the Fed held down interest rates to stimulate economic growth, and the dollar declined against most foreign currencies. But this process of equilibration did not affect the dollar-yuan exchange rate, nor the dollar’s exchange rate with other Asian currencies effectively fixed against the dollar. 93. Other factors have of course contributed to the decline of manufacturing employment, including automation and globalization. But a 2012 study estimated that currency manipulation by twenty countries, China by far the largest, had cost the United States between 1 million and 5 million jobs.

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A more recent caveat is of greater interest. The economist Dani Rodrik notes that automation is reducing the level of employment required even for basic manufacturing. Thus, nations that industrialized during the midcentury, like Taiwan, often saw manufacturing employment peak above 30 percent of the workforce. More recently, however, manufacturing employment peaked at just 16 percent in Brazil and at 20 percent in Mexico — and it may not reach even those levels in the next generation of industrial debutantes. “It is not implausible,” Rodrik wrote in a 2017 book, Straight Talk on Trade, “that the East Asian tiger economies will be the last countries to ever experience industrialization in the manner to which economic history has accustomed us.” 115.

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Caterpillar, the Illinois company that dominated the global market for heavy construction vehicles in the decades after World War II, reported in 1983 that the dollar’s rise had cut its foreign sales in half. It fired twenty thousand workers and moved some jobs overseas. One million domestic mining and factory jobs were lost during Reagan’s first term. The decline of American manufacturing employment is a long-term trend caused mostly by automation rather than foreign trade. In the 1880s, factories and farms employed roughly three quarters of American workers. By the 1980s, those sectors employed roughly one quarter of American workers even as the output of factories and farms continued to rise.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

The development of the assembly line greatly increased efficiency, and as prices for products fell, they became accessible to more and more people.[52] As demand grew, factories had to hire new armies of workers, and peacetime manufacturing employment peaked around 1920 at an estimated 26.9 percent of the civilian labor force.[53] Methods of measuring the size of the labor force have changed somewhat over time, so we can’t perfectly compare this figure with those of later decades, but a general fact is clear. Aside from the disruptions of the Great Depression (when manufacturing employment temporarily fell) and World War II (when it temporarily rose), the US workforce maintained about 1 in 4 people in manufacturing until the 1970s.[54] For roughly five decades, there was no overall upward or downward trend.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All Employees, Manufacturing (MANEMP)”; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Civilian Labor Force Level (CLF16OV).” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63 Note that available data does not properly reflect the effects of the Great Depression, which likely caused a more sudden decline in manufacturing employment than shown in this graph, or of World War II, which caused a brief but dramatic increase in manufacturing employment that’s not captured by the BLS total labor force data, which does not stretch back that far. See US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All Employees, Manufacturing (MANEMP)”; US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Civilian Labor Force Level (CLF16OV)”; Lebergott, “Labor Force and Employment, 1800–1960,” 119–20.

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Thus, the average manufacturing worker, assisted by smarter machines, could produce more and more goods every hour. In fact, in the two decades from 1992 to 2012, as computerization transformed factory production, the hourly output of the average manufacturing worker doubled (adjusting for inflation).[56] As a result, during the twenty-first century, manufacturing output and manufacturing employment have decoupled. In February 2001, just before the post-dot-com recession, 17 million Americans had manufacturing jobs.[57] This dropped sharply during the recession and never recovered—jobs stayed flat at around 14 million all through the mid-2000s boom despite a substantial increase in output.[58] In December 2007, at the start of the Great Recession, about 13.7 million Americans were working in manufacturing, and this had fallen to 11.4 million by February 2010.[59] Manufacturing output quickly rebounded and by 2018 was back near all-time highs—but many of the lost jobs never came back.[60] Even in November 2022, only 12.9 million workers were needed to produce that output.[61] Looking back over the past century, these trends are striking.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

The increased availability of capital, from both the shift from a capital-intensive economy to a knowledge-intensive economy in high-wage economies and the high saving rates in many low-wage economies, like China’s, accelerates investment offshore that reduces manufacturing employment in high-wage economies. Productivity gains from capital investment now hollow out manufacturing employment and drive unskilled workers to the harder-to-manage service sector, where productivity growth has been slower. Meanwhile, the baby boom, the increased participation of women in the workforce, immigration, and international trade greatly increased the supply of labor, especially lower-skilled labor.

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Advocates of income redistribution have been quick to blame the success of the 1 percent for this slowing wage growth. Their arguments, however—that success is unearned, technology hollows out the middle class, and poor-quality education unnecessarily holds back students—are suspect. More likely, trade, immigration, and manufacturing productivity gains, which have hollowed out manufacturing employment, have flooded the economy with a near-unlimited supply of lesser-skilled workers. This increased supply in combination with resources that constrain growth—namely, properly trained talent and the economy’s capacity and willingness to take risk—hold back wage growth. In an economy constrained only by labor, trade and immigration grow the economy without reducing wages—no different than population growth.

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We see the opposite. Low-skilled employment is not growing in highly productive capital-intensive sectors like manufacturing, for example. Instead, we see capital investment producing productivity gains that exceed the growth in the demand for manufactured products, which, in turn, hollows out manufacturing employment. Lower-skilled employment has subsequently grown in less productive service sectors like retail, restaurants, household employment, and healthcare.25 In turn, low-skilled immigrant labor has skewed toward employment in these sectors.26 Pro-trade and immigration theories assume that businesses will capitalize on the availability of lesser-skilled labor, and competition will force employers to invest capital to raise the productivity of new and displaced workers up to the rest of the workforce.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

Franco, “Global Competition in the 1990s: American Renewal, Japanese Resilience, European Cross-Currents,” Business Horizons, May–June 2002, p. 25. 119 Ibid., Tables 1, 2. 120 Economic Report of the President 2002, Tables B-2 and B-51. 121 This data was supplied on request by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 122 The peak of US manufacturing employment had occurred in 1979; by 1999 the number of workers in US manufacturing was 2.5 million lower than in 1979, and below where it had been in 1966, even though overall US employment had doubled since then. Economic Report, Tables B-46 and B-51. The decline in manufacturing jobs affected virtually every advanced capitalist country. See André Bernard, “Trends in Manufacturing Employment’, Perspectives, February 2009, Statistics Canada. Available at statcan.gc.ca. 123 US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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The second transformation—the one most associated with the thesis of US decline—occurred in the core industries that had fueled American economic dynamism in the postwar era. The old labor-intensive sectors like shoes, textiles, food, and beverage had seen a sharp contraction well before the 1980s, but it was rising imports and the corresponding loss of jobs in steel, auto, and machinery that occasioned alarm about the state of American manufacturing. Employment in the automobile sector fell by a quarter of a million jobs between 1979 and 1983, and by the end of the 1980s foreign-based producers had captured almost half of the US car market (up from less than 20 percent before the first energy crisis, in 1973). Steel employment had also been falling through the 1970s, but between 1980 and 1984, amid bankruptcies, closures, and layoffs that often devastated entire communities, it was cut in half (a decrease of some 200,000 jobs), and continued to fall thereafter.

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Japan and Germany ranked second and third, with shares of 21 percent and 6 percent respectively; the EU as a whole had a share of 24 percent, and China accounted for 3 percent.117 This also helps explain why “large American companies maintained or increased their world market shares in 12 of the 18 most important global industries” right through the 1990s.118 By the end of the century, of the top dozen global firms by sector, the US accounted for 77 percent of the world’s aerospace sales, 75 percent of all sales of computers and office equipment, 91 percent of computer software sales, and 62 percent of pharmaceuticals.119 Shored up by its high-tech sectors, during 1983–99 US manufacturing output grew faster (4.2 percent annually) than overall GDP (3.7 percent).120 The restructuring led to manufacturing productivity actually growing faster in these years (3.3 percent annually) than it had in the “golden” 1950s and 1960s (when it had averaged 2.4 percent).121 This enormous productivity growth was reflected in an increase in overall manufacturing volume of 90 percent over the same period, while manufacturing employment showed virtually no increase at all (of the 34.4 million private sector jobs created in the US in these years, 99.2 percent were outside manufacturing).122 The trajectory of the computer and peripheral equipment sector captures this well: it achieved an astonishing annual increase in real output of 29 percent throughout the 1990s; but with productivity growing at the even more extraordinary rate of 31 percent, there was no net job growth.123 The fourth structural transformation in the economy involved the growth of a diverse range of “professional and business services” that ranged across consulting, law, accounting, market research, engineering, computer software, and systems analysis.

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

At the same time, industrywide collective bargains were watered down with so-called opening clauses that gave local union representatives the option to negotiate bespoke deals at the company level. By the end of the 1990s, most of the remaining German union members were working under these looser contracts. The unions’ priority was to preserve jobs at the cost of forgoing pay raises. They failed: between 1993 and 1997, German manufacturing employment fell by 15 percent. Unemployment in the West rose steadily from roughly 5 percent in 1991 to nearly 10 percent by the end of 1997. Across Germany, three million full-time jobs vanished while only one million part-time jobs were added. At the same time, most workers saw their real wages fall throughout the 1990s before plummeting in the 2000s.

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Unfortunately, while export revenues did rise, they did not grow nearly enough. Competition from abroad was not, by itself, the problem. American manufacturers had done relatively well in the 1990s because they were competing with imports at a time of strong domestic and foreign demand. A strong global market had also supported American manufacturing employment in the 1990s despite massive improvements in labor-saving technology. In the 2000s, however, demand was depressed in large parts of the world, including the United States. The result was that foreign imports displaced American productive output at the expense of American jobs and incomes.

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Fig. 6.6 The great slump (real household consumption spending per person, January 1947 = 100). Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis; Matthew Klein’s calculations The impact on American producers has been even worse than in the 2000s: as of the end of 2018, manufacturing output and manufacturing capacity were both lower than at the previous peak in 2008. Manufacturing employment was still down about 10 percent from its levels in 2006. America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods (excluding refined petroleum products) was now worth more than 4 percent of GDP—its highest level since the nineteenth century. Worryingly, this deterioration in America’s manufacturing trade position is mostly attributable to stagnant exports of advanced capital goods combined with soaring imports of competing products from abroad.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

Within the Parkdale plant, “only infrequently does a person interrupt the automation, mainly because certain tasks are still cheaper if performed by hand—like moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.”6 Completed yarn is conveyed automatically toward packing and shipping machines along pathways attached to the ceiling. Nonetheless, those 140 factory jobs represent at least a partial reversal of a decades-long decline in manufacturing employment. The US textile industry was decimated in the 1990s as production moved to low-wage countries, especially China, India, and Mexico. About 1.2 million jobs—more than three-quarters of domestic employment in the textile sector—vanished between 1990 and 2012. The last few years, however, have seen a dramatic rebound in production.

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The total value of imports from China amounted to less than 3 percent of US consumer spending.50 It is undoubtedly true that, as Figure 2.8 shows, the fraction of American workers employed in manufacturing has fallen dramatically since the early 1950s. This trend began decades before enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s and the rise of China in the 2000s. In fact, the decline seems to have halted at the end of the Great Recession as manufacturing employment has actually outperformed the job market as a whole. Figure 2.8. Percentage of US Workers in Manufacturing SOURCE: US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED).51 A potent force has been very consistently eliminating jobs in the manufacturing sector. That force is advancing technology.

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As we saw in Chapter 1, Chinese factories are already moving aggressively to introduce robots and automation. Some factories are reshoring to advanced countries or moving to even lower-wage countries like Vietnam. A look back at Figure 2.8 in Chapter 2 shows clearly that advancing technology resulted in a relentless sixty-year collapse in American manufacturing employment. It’s inevitable that China must ultimately follow essentially the same path, and it’s quite possible that the decline in factory employment may turn out to be even more rapid than in the United States. While automation in American factories progressed only as fast as the new technology could be invented, China’s manufacturing sector can, in many cases, simply import leading-edge technology from abroad.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

The union agreed to keep wages steady. GM and Ford pledged to reopen plants in the United States and not to shift production to Mexico as they had planned. By early 2012, the Big Three carmakers planned to invest several billion dollars to retool multiple plants in the United States. More broadly, manufacturing employment edged up in both 2010 and 2011, adding more than three hundred thousand jobs, and U.S. manufacturing exports began to rise. And by 2012, the once irresistible cost advantages of China were looking less attractive to some U.S. employers. With labor unrest and wage inflation in China and stagnant or falling wages in America, a few companies such as General Electric, Otis Elevator, and Master Lock of Milwaukee have begun to bring jobs back from China to the United States—and smart government policies could foster that trend.

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Grove’s answer, revealing for an American CEO, is that offshoring U.S. jobs is far too important an issue for our nation to be left to our multinational companies and their CEOs. Grove argues that it will take a new national strategy and a broad commitment in U.S. industry to regenerate America’s muscle in manufacturing. A few glimmers have begun to appear—a handful of plants coming back from China, a modest uptick in manufacturing employment, and business leaders such as Grove speaking out. But much more needs to be done, as you will see in the final section of this book. CHAPTER 16 HOLLOWING OUT HIGH-END JOBS IBM: SHIFTING THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY TO INDIA Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gain.

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“Without an industrial base, the nation’s trade deficit will continue to grow…. Without an industrial base, the United States will be increasingly dependent on foreign manufacturers even for its key military technology.” Immelt, too, insists that technology-based manufacturing must be central to reviving the U.S. economy. His goal is to see manufacturing employment double, from 9 to 20 percent of the nation’s workforce—a target endorsed by the Horizon Project, a task force of former CEOs led by Leo Hindery, Jr., who used to run AT&T Broadband. “You cannot survive as a nation of such size and complexity with such a small manufacturing workforce as we have,” Hindery asserts.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

in Europe and Asia: See International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics Report 2016, September 29, 2016, Figure 2.9, https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/world-robotics-report-2016, and James Carroll, “Industrial Robots in the United States on the Rise,” Vision Systems Design, September 6, 2016, www.vision-systems.com/articles/2016/12/industrial-robots-in-the-united-states-on-the-rise.html. since the late 1970s: Total manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, when roughly 19.5 million Americans held manufacturing jobs. See, e.g., Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth, “U.S. Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 3–26, 12, Figure 2. Hereafter cited as Baily and Bosworth, “U.S. Manufacturing.” Since then, domestic manufacturing employment has fallen steadily. By 1992 the sector sustained only 16.5 million jobs, and by 2012, manufacturing employment had fallen to below 12 million, although it would subsequently recover to just over 12 million.

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And to employ the same percentage of the American workforce in manufacturing today as worked in the sector in the mid-1960s, the economy would require perhaps twenty-five million more manufacturing jobs than it currently provides. At the same time, although less familiarly, the new technologies have created a new group of glossy jobs staffed by super-skilled industrial workers who design, program, and manage automated production processes. Even as overall domestic manufacturing employment fell by roughly a third between 1992 and 2012, the number of manufacturing jobs for workers with college degrees increased by 2.4 percent, and the number of manufacturing jobs for workers with graduate degrees increased by 44 percent. These super-skilled workers are more productive—much more productive—than the mid-skilled workers they replace, and their productivity has allowed manufacturing’s share of real gross domestic product to hold steady even as its share of employment declined.

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See Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation—May 2017, Summary Table A, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_06022017.pdf. Twenty-five percent of 150 million is 37.5 million. On the other hand, total manufacturing today employs perhaps 12 million persons. See Baily and Bosworth, “U.S. Manufacturing,” 12, Figure 2. increased by 44 percent: This entails that more than 100 percent of the overall decline in manufacturing employment comes from the mid-skilled, non-college-educated segment of the industrial workforce. See Robert Shapiro, “Robotic Technologies Could Aggravate the U.S. Problem of Slow Jobs Growth,” Daily Beast, July 19, 2013, accessed November 18, 2018, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/19/robotic-technologies-could-aggravate-the-u-s-problem-of-slow-jobs-growth.html.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

In contrast, there was an 80 percent increase during 2011–13 in the compensation of Caterpillar’s CEO, whose quoted mantra is “we can never make enough money … we can never make enough profit.”23 Foreign companies such as Volkswagen continue to open plants in the nonunion right-to-work states. By lowering wages compared to wages in union-dominated northern states, these foreign transplant factories help keep overall U.S. manufacturing employment from declining further. But any progress in arresting the decades-long decline in manufacturing employment appears to be contingent on maintaining worker wages at about half the level that the automobile union had achieved for its workers before the bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler. In the 2009–2013 recovery, manufacturing regained only 600,000 of the 6 million jobs that had been lost since 2001, and most of those were contingent on hiring workers at wage rates that were substantially lower than were common in manufacturing as recently as 2001.24 INCREASED INEQUALITY AT THE TOP Table 18–2 focused on the gap between the growth rate of average real income since 1975 as contrasted either with income growth at the median (i.e., fiftieth percentile) of that distribution.

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For this reason, the increase in the import share of GDP has contributed to the decline in the relative wages of unskilled and middle-skilled workers. In one particularly striking analysis, David Autor and co-authors calculated that imports from China between 1990 and 2007 accounted for about a quarter of the decline in manufacturing employment during that period and that they also lowered wages, reduced the labor force participation rate, and raised publicly financed transfer payments.10 The inroads of imports go beyond final goods, because both firms and countries increasingly specialize in different stages of production. For instance, increases of automobile parts more than doubled between 2001 and 2014, from $63 billion to $138 billion, and caused many U.S. parts manufacturers to close their domestic factories and in some cases to “offshore” parts production to foreign countries, particularly Mexico.11 Taken together, increased import penetration and outsourcing represent the combined effects of globalization on the levels of both employment and wages in the domestic economy.

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The previous literature has noted the fact that among high school dropouts, wages of domestic and foreign-born workers were almost identical up to 1980, but by 2004, foreign-born workers earned 15–20 percent less.15 Downward pressure on wages in the bottom 90 percent would have occurred even if there had been no erosion of unionization nor a growth of imports or immigration. The steady pace of automation—the replacement of jobs by machines—would have contributed to a decline of the relative incomes of those in the bottom 90 percent. Relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs have eroded, as the share of manufacturing employment in the United States declined from 30 percent in 1953 to less than 10 percent currently. The automation effect overlaps with “skill-biased technical change” that results in the destruction of routine jobs that are close substitutes to software-driven computers, and these job losses have occurred not just in the assembly lines of manufacturing plants, but also in such routine office occupations as typist, bookkeeper, clerk, receptionist, and others.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida
Published 22 Apr 2010

By the turn of the twentieth century, the economic landscape was also transformed.3 Between 1870 and 1900, the populations of urban areas exploded. New York City’s population more than tripled, rising from 942,000 to 3.4 million people. Philadelphia expanded from 550,000 to 1.3 million people, and Chicago swelled from 300,000 to 1.3 million. Manufacturing employment in these three cities grew by 245 percent over the same period.4 The period also saw the rise of a new set of massive industrial cities. Pittsburgh grew from 86,000 people in 1870 to more than 320,000 in 1900; Detroit from 79,000 to 285,000; Cleveland from 92,000 to 382,000. Across the nation, the number of Americans living in urban areas surged by more than 20 million, as the share of the population counted as urban rose from 25 to 40 percent.

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(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 21–53. 4. Population data for American cities are from Campbell Gibson, “Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990,” U.S. Census, June 1998, retrieved from www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html. Data on manufacturing employment are from Gordon, “Capitalist Development and the History of American Cities.” 5. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984). 6. Statistics on immigration and immigrants during the First Reset are from Campbell J.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

Our commercial lives reside mostly in the real world of bricks and mortar, of food and clothes, of cars and houses, and, until some sci-fi future arrives where we’re just disembodied brains in vats, that will continue to be the case. Bits are thrilling, but when it comes to the overall economy, it’s all about atoms. Yet the cost of labor has made it harder and harder to keep manufacturing industries going in the rich countries of the West. Driven by the exodus of factory jobs due largely to Asian cost advantages, manufacturing employment in the United States is at a century-long low, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of total working population. What’s worse, those factories that are bucking the trend are having trouble finding qualified workers, as a generation has turned away from manufacturing as a career option.

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Add to that the increasing cost of transportation across the seas, the political risk of trade wars and tariffs and the hidden costs of delays and disruption in shipping along with the excess inventory needed to buffer that, and you can see why the Eastward migration of manufacturing may have peaked.38 Can Makers make jobs? But one thing we have not been making more of in recent years is manufacturing jobs. Even as output doubled over the past four decades, manufacturing employment fell by about 30 percent over that period. The increased output was a result of improved production efficiency (mostly automation) leading to greater productivity per employee, not more workers. Meanwhile, the biggest creators of jobs in the American economy are small and medium-sized business—exactly what manufacturing moved away from over the previous decades as companies searched for economies of scale to compete with low-cost labor overseas.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

In December 2019, the Federal Reserve released the first close study of the impact of Trump’s economic policies on consumer welfare. The language of the study was delicate, but the conclusions were damning. “We find that tariff increases enacted in 2018 are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices.” And while some might argue that hurting consumers is an acceptable price to pay to revive US manufacturing, “our results suggest that the tariffs have not boosted manufacturing employment or output, even as they increased producer prices.”27 The Trump tax cuts were justified in great part as a means to entice US corporations to book their profits where the US government could tax them.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

This resulted in lower prices, higher efficiencies, and some new opportunities but also increased pressures on American workers who now had to compete with a global labor pool. Automation started out on farms earlier in the century with tractors and then migrated to factories in the 1970s. Manufacturing employment began to slip around 1978 as wage growth began to fall. Median wages used to go up in lockstep with productivity and GDP growth before diverging sharply in the 1970s. Since 1973, productivity has skyrocketed relative to the hourly compensation of the average wage earner: How workers are compensated and how their companies perform stopped being aligned over the same period.

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Almost 9 million working-age Americans receive disability benefits. That’s more than the entire population of New Jersey or Virginia. The percentage of working-age Americans who received disability benefits was 5.2 percent in 2017, up from only 2.5 percent in 1980. Disability applications started surging in 2000, the same year that manufacturing employment started to plummet. The average benefit size in June 2017 was $1,172 per month, at a total cost of about $143 billion per year. The age of the disabled has gone down—in 2014, 15 percent of men and 16.2 percent of women in their 30s or early 40s were on disability, up from 6.6 percent and 6.4 percent in the 1960s.

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
by Gabriel Winant
Published 23 Mar 2021

Across the industrial areas of the country, communities secured through their attachment to these industries came under intensifying economic pressure.35 This long dissolution of the industrial working class happened, however, in the context of the postwar welfare state. Across the industrial United States and the entire global North, working-class people responded to the secular crisis of manufacturing employment by making demands on state institutions, directly in political forms and indirectly through mass behavior as social service consumers. And across the entire deindustrializing world, a wave of welfare state expansion followed in the immediate aftermath, as governments responded to these demands and sought to manage the appearance of new forms of poverty amid the postwar plenty.36 In the United States, we have not understood this political phenomenon as a single event but rather know it as a sequence: the War on Poverty, the Great Society, the urban uprisings, the welfare rights and Black Power movements, the Young Lords, labor’s rank-and-file rebellion, the fiscal crisis of the state, and stagflation.

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The workforces that grew most during this time were those in which Black women had already spent years participating, laboring in the lower strata of the hierarchy: doing the laundry, cooking and serving the food, changing the sheets, and cleaning the bodies. While it was common for observers to note the numerical replacement of high-wage industrial jobs with low-wage service jobs, few perceived any connection between these processes. “The decline of manufacturing employment was accompanied by a steady increase of employment in service industries,” observed a RAND Corporation study. “For many, the loss of manufacturing jobs meant unemployment or lower-paying jobs in new occupations.” In this typical analysis, the relationship between the two processes appeared to be coincidental.3 The rapid growth in the late 1970s of the largest “new economy” sector, health care, resulted from the interaction between the existing institutions of the welfare state and the broad effects of industrial decline.

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“Leaving the home, in most cases, is not considered an option because the women feel they just can’t break up the home when employment prospects are dim and financial problems severe for their husbands,” observed Shirl Quay of the Women’s Center and Shelter in Aliquippa.54 The crisis of manufacturing employment thus remade the population. Bodies were older and more worn, carrying more damage and more needs. At a conference at St. Francis Hospital titled “Unemployment—the Epidemic Nobody Treats,” sociologist Ann Mooney warned that cardiovascular disorders “typically start increasing about three years after the recession.”

City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

If each customer spends $10 (20 percent of $50) per month, the gross receipt per store is perhaps $650. With a 20 percent gross profit margin, that makes $130 per month per store. This perhaps translates to something like $60 per month in net profits—enough to make the grocery business stand up against most forms of manufacturing employment so long as business remains this good. If the store is family-operated—most were—it is quite possible that this income stream is combined with another job, perhaps a factory job. Of the 628, 97 were run under women’s names, and the number actually operated by women was probably higher. The labor of children and adolescents would be folded into such an operation on a daily basis, appearing nowhere in the formal accounts of the operation.

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In 1916 it occupied 81 outdoor acres for production and another 23 acres for shipping and storage. Its steam boilers produced 7,650 horsepower, and its steam turbines added 11,175 more. It consumed 75,000 tons of coal, 3.4 billion cubic feet of combustible gas, 10,000 tons of steel, and 13,500 tons of lead, and occupied 3.25 million feet of interior plant floor.52 It was the largest manufacturing employer in New Haven and one of the largest in the world, reaching 12,000 workers by 1916 under the impetus of World War I. New Haven Clock Company, founded in the 1850s, built on the stamped-brass 108 F A B R I C O F E N T E R P R I S E technology of Chauncey Jerome’s clockworks to become a low-cost producer on a world scale.

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But the largest plant of all, Winchester Repeating Arms, was desperately searching for customers and was now merely part of a corporate network within which Alton, Illinois, was every bit as important as New Haven. Manufacturing firms were not considering central New Haven as a site for new facilities. A sophisticated 1945 economic analysis commissioned by the New Haven Chamber of Commerce had shown that the 295 E N D O F U R B A N I S M rate of change in New Haven’s manufacturing employment base had slipped markedly below national rates during 1943 and 1944.18 It had even slipped behind many comparable cities, including Buffalo, Trenton, and nearby Bridgeport. The report, written by Roy Wenzleck of St. Louis, made unflattering comparisons between New Haven’s economy and those of boomtowns like San Diego, Fort Worth, and Houston.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

A year later a far more extensive programme of corporatization was announced: all but the most important of the SOEs were to be converted into ‘share-based co-operatives’ in which all employees had the nominal right to purchase shares. Further waves of privatization/conversion of the SOEs occurred in the late 1990s so that, by 2002, SOEs accounted for only 14 per cent of total manufacturing employment relative to the 40 per cent share they had held in 1990. The most recent step has been to open both the TVEs and the SOEs to full foreign ownership.13 Foreign direct investment, for its part, met with very mixed results in the 1980s. It was initially channelled into four special economic zones in southern coastal regions.

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In September 2003, for example, Samsung Electronics announced it was moving its entire PC-making business to China, having previously invested $2.5 billion there, ‘creating 10 sales subsidiaries and 26 production companies, employing a total of 42,000 people’.35 Japanese outsourcing of production to China contributed to the decline in Japanese manufacturing employment from 15.7 million in 1992 to 13.1 million in 2001. Japanese companies also began to withdraw from Malaysia, Thailand, and elsewhere in order to relocate in China. They are now so heavily invested in China that ‘more than half of China–Japan trade is conducted among Japanese companies’.36 As happened in the US, corporations can do very well while their home countries suffer.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

It is generally desirable for economies to adapt to changing global patterns by shifting low value production to areas which can produce the same goods more cheaply, replacing them with higher value production. Indeed, all industrial nations have experienced a fall in the role played by manufacturing. Between 1974 and 2001, manufacturing employment fell by a third across the nations which make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. What is significant is that the falls in the UK and the US have been much steeper. 95 In Mrs Thatcher’s first term alone, as the number of bankruptcies exploded, manufacturing output fell by a third.

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William Benedetto, head of corporate finance for Dean Witter Reynolds—one of America’s largest stock brokerage and securities’ firms—called Ronald Reagan’s eight-year Presidency ‘an investment banker’s dream world.’96 But while Wall Street flourished, key industrial sectors from timber and steel to chemicals and high-technology, sweated. Between 1970 and 1990, American employment in manufacturing shrank from 27 to 17 per cent of the workforce. This was mostly the product of finance initiated industrial restructuring, including the shift of production centres abroad by American corporations.97 The fall in manufacturing employment continued after 1990, with the mild recession of 2000-2003 accelerating the long term trend.98 In the UK, globalisation, the abolition of international control over exchange rates and the pursuit of a strong pound all hastened the decline of manufacturing. For the City, the end of exchange controls (the rules that had restricted movements of money between nations since the Second World War), high real interest rates and the appreciating pound from 1979 produced what one commentator described in 1981 as ‘dream conditions for London’s financial apparatus.’ 99 Hot money flowed into London and bankers enjoyed, for the first time since 1939, complete freedom over where to invest these increased inflows.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
by Alan Ehrenhalt
Published 23 Apr 2012

When the mayor spoke those words, the city had suffered through nearly a generation of economic and demographic decline and social disorder, to which no clear end was in sight. In fact, however, by 1989 many of Chicago’s problems were already beginning to ease up. The loss of factory jobs was indeed horrendous: four hundred thousand of them between 1969 and 1983 alone, or 32 percent of the city’s total manufacturing employment base. This was roughly comparable to what was happening in other Midwestern industrial cities, except in one respect: Virtually all the other cities—Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis—were unable to come up with new kinds of jobs to replace them. Chicago did. In Chicago, the downtown Loop and lakefront corridor running north from it gradually became a magnet for service and professional work: banking, brokerage, insurance, architecture, and various forms of temporary office employment.

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Philadelphia has a population of 1.4 million and a little more than six hundred thousand jobs. And the greatest effect of that imbalance has been felt in the old row-house neighborhoods that spread north and west from Center City. Philadelphia’s neighborhoods were not merely places to live; they were all-purpose communities wound tightly around manufacturing employment. They were lunch-pail neighborhoods. The breadwinners in those small homes walked to their factory jobs in the morning, carried their sustenance with them, and walked back home again later in the afternoon to open a beer and glance at the evening paper. The factories closed up in a period of just a few decades: In 1950, 45 percent of the city’s jobs were in manufacturing; by 1980, according to Pew’s Philadelphia Research Initiative, that figure was down to 20 percent.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

It lost its leading position in the world’s industrial hierarchy by the time of the First World War, but the dominance of manufacturing in the British economy itself continued for a long time afterwards. Until the early 1970s, together with Germany, Britain had one of the world’s highest shares of manufacturing employment in total employment, at around 35 per cent. At the time, Britain was the quintessential manufacturing economy, exporting manufactured goods and importing food, fuel and raw materials. Its manufacturing trade surplus (manufacturing exports minus manufacturing imports) stayed consistently between 4 per cent and 6 per cent of GDP during the 1960s and 70s.

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Even though there is no reliable estimate of its magnitude, experts agree that outsourcing has been a significant source of de-industrialization in the US and Britain, especially during the 1980s. In addition to the outsourcing effect, the extent of manufacturing contraction is exaggerated by what is called the ‘reclassification effect’.2 A UK government report estimates that up to 10 per cent of the fall in manufacturing employment between 1998 and 2006 in the UK may be accounted for by some manufacturing firms, seeing their service activities becoming predominant, applying to the government statistical agency to be reclassified as service firms, even when they are still engaged in some manufacturing activities. One cause of genuine de-industrialization has recently attracted a lot of attention.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

So the China shock index measures the vulnerability of a region’s industrial mix to China’s strength by weighing each product type by China’s import to the EU. US commuting zones fared very differently depending on what they happened to produce. Those zones more affected by the China shock experienced substantially larger reductions in manufacturing employment. More strikingly, there was no reallocation of labor to new kinds of jobs. The total number of jobs lost was often larger than merely the number of jobs lost in the industries that were hit, and rarely less. This is presumably a consequence of the clustering effect we talked about. Those who lost their jobs tightened their belts, further reducing the economic activity in the area.

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Enrico Moretti and a colleague compared the TVA region with six other areas initially supposed to receive the same type of investment but where, for various political reasons, nothing happened. They found that between 1930 and 1960, the TVA counties generated gains both in agricultural and manufacturing employment relative to this comparison group. It is true that once outside funding for the program stopped in 1960, the gains in agriculture vanished, but the gains in manufacturing persisted and actually continued to intensify all the way until 2000, consistent with a widely held view that spillovers are more important in manufacturing than in agriculture.

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This is something most Europeans probably think is worth preserving and certainly contributes to the quality of their lives and the sense of what it is to be a European. Would French GDP be higher if agricultural production were more concentrated and farmhouses were replaced by warehouses? Possibly. Would welfare be higher? Probably not. The analogy between protecting manufacturing employment in the United States and protecting nature in France may seem strange. But pretty countrysides attract tourists and keep young people around to take care of their aging parents. Similarly, the company town can ensure there is a high school, some sports teams, a main street with a few shops, and a sense of belonging somewhere.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

All of this means that manufacturing beats services in generating additional value throughout the economy. And manufacturing has been a long-lasting source of economic growth, with structural transformation within the sector (increase of value added) being the more important reason of this stimulus than the scale of manufacturing employment (Cantore et al. 2017). Manufacturing is also a leading provider of well-paying jobs and the leading source of traded goods. The latter reality is particularly important in a global economy, in which nations with a strong competitive traded sector have a great advantage (Atkinson et al. 2012; Smil 2013c).

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Other affluent countries have traveled along similar trajectories as their shares of GDP value added by manufacturing have declined well below 20%: in 2017 they ranged from 18% for Switzerland to 10% for France (the EU mean was 14%), with Germany (21%), the Czech Republic (24%), and South Korea (28%) being the three exceptions (World Bank 2019). The US share is now less than 12%; the Canadian contribution is nearly as low as in the United Kingdom. Job losses have been severe. The US manufacturing employment peaked in September 1979 with 19.6 million jobs, it declined to 17 million by the end of the year 2000, and then (as China joined the World Trade Organization and the surge of cheap imports flooded the United States) it fell to the record low of 11.4 million by March 2010, followed by a partial recovery to 12.8 million by the end of 2019 (FRED 2019).

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This premature deindustrialization has not been due to any changes in the sector’s development potential but it has been a consequence of a rapid shift of manufacturing to a small number of countries, most obviously to China and South Korea and, for specific industries, including apparel and electronics, also to Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia, or Bangladesh (Haraguchi et al. 2016). This shift also means that, contrary to a common perception, the manufacturing’s share of global employment did not fall between 1970 and 2010: rapid within-country manufacturing productivity growth that lowers national manufacturing employment shares in advanced economies was counterbalanced by increased manufacturing jobs in lower-productivity economies (Felipe and Mehta 2016). From factories to services Allan Fisher, in his pioneering paper on three economic sectors, includes “the whole of the transport and communication, and commerce and finance groups, as well as professional workers, and those engaged in public administration, entertainment and sport, or personal and domestic services” in the last category (Fisher 1939, 36).

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 3 Mar 2020

Unions were weak or absent; employers cracked the whip; staff jumped or moved on, to be replaced by employees on the same or less money. Companies kept a larger slice of their revenue for directors and shareholders, and the share of GDP going to workers fell. All this linked with the loss of solid jobs in the public services and the long-running move away from skilled and better-paid manufacturing employment to (often unskilled and less well-paid) jobs in the service industries. The trend also helped explain why inflation didn’t rise: in services prices changed much less regularly than for goods. We don’t say that everything was bad; rather it’s the counterfactual, that things could have been so much better than they were.

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Their strategies for transport, telecoms and infrastructure turned out to be wish lists, with little sense of how they fitted together and how they were to be paid for. George Osborne had promised ‘the march of the makers’; by 2020 the march had not prevented the closure of Honda in Swindon, British Steel in Scunthorpe or Ford at Bridgend, and the shutdowns continue. The GMB union calculated a drop of 600,000 in manufacturing employment, but manufacturing as a proportion of GDP nonetheless stabilised. Some thought conventional definitions failed to capture the new boundary between making things and making software and systems for making things. Theresa May promised a reinvigorated industrial strategy. What she meant was unclear; her weak government could not muster the effort to drive a coherent policy through different departments.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

If robots do replace people, then we should see a decline in manufacturing jobs in places where more robots are put in use in manufacturing. But as Mark Muro and Scott Andes of the Brookings Institution write in the Harvard Business Review: [There is] . . . no visible relationship between the use of robots and the change in manufacturing employment. Despite the installation of far more robots between 1993 and 2007, Germany lost just 19% of its manufacturing jobs between 1996 and 2012 compared to a 33% drop in the U.S. They then go on to point out that other countries, such as Italy, South Korea, and France, lost a smaller percentage of manufacturing jobs than did the United States even though they deployed more robots than the United States did.

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They then go on to point out that other countries, such as Italy, South Korea, and France, lost a smaller percentage of manufacturing jobs than did the United States even though they deployed more robots than the United States did. On the other end of the spectrum, other countries including the United Kingdom and Australia invested less than the United States in robots and had even bigger declines in manufacturing employment. The idea that robots would create manufacturing jobs and not destroy them is not as surprising as it might seem. When you can introduce efficiencies in an industry, you lower costs or increase quality. Lower costs and increased quality invite higher production, which creates jobs. The truth is that technology mostly augments workers, not replaces them.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

This means that many (if not most) developing nations are becoming service economies without having had a proper experience of industrialization—a process I have called “premature deindustrialization.” While early industrializers managed to place 30 percent or more of their workforce in manufacturing, the most recent rounds of latecomers have rarely managed that feat. Brazil’s manufacturing employment peaked at 16 percent and Mexico’s at 20 percent. In India, manufacturing employment began to lose ground (in relative terms) after it reached 13 percent.3 Latin America appears to be the worst-hit region. But worryingly similar trends are very much evidenced in Sub-Saharan Africa too, where few countries had much industrialization to begin with.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

“Manager of the Century”: Geoff Colvin, “The Ultimate Manager,” Fortune, November 22, 1999, https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/11/22/269126/index.htm. American manufacturing jobs peaked: Katelynn Harris, “Forty years of falling manufacturing employment,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, November 2020, https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm. American companies spent less than $50 billion: Liyu Zeng, “Examining Share Repurchasing and the S&P Buyback Indices in the U.S. Market,” S&P Dow Jones Indices, April 2016. In 1980 the average pay: Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe, “CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978,” Economic Policy Institute, August 14, 2019, https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

For markets to work well enough to discipline firms, some state action is needed. Large firms are much more prevalent in affluent countries than in developing countries. In the United States, plants with fifty or more employees account for over 80 percent of total manufacturing employment. In Thailand they account for 30 percent of manufacturing employment, and in Indonesia and Ghana, 15 percent. In the United States, plants with less than ten employees account for a mere 4 percent of jobs, whereas in Thailand such tiny plants account for 60 percent, and in Indonesia and Ghana, about 80 percent.10 Richer countries have larger firms.

The Gated City (Kindle Single)
by Ryan Avent
Published 30 Aug 2011

Cotton, for instance, came into the port, made its way through New York factories, and exited the port as textiles destined for markets around the world. It was these manufacturing industries, and their near-limitless appetite for labor, that drove most of the city's phenomenal population growth (not least because manufacturing employment opportunities allowed the city to retain much of the immigrant population entering the city). As New York’s industrial economy grew, it supported the development of complementary sectors. Finance and insurance developed in tandem with shipping. Design grew hand-in-hand with textile production.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

China became a member of the World Trade Organization on December 11, 2001. It marked the end of lengthy negotiations as well as a significant step toward the integration of China into the world economy. Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors (2016) estimate that import competition from China was a major force behind reductions in US manufacturing employment during the 2000s. Imports from China to the US had risen since the early 1990s and experienced a very rapid rise in the 2000s. This growth affected different US industries in different ways. One effect is particularly interesting for us. Before 2000, China was not considered to be a market economy.

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Wages and human capital in the U.S. finance industry: 1909–2006. Quarterly Journal of Economics 127(4), 1551–1609. Philippon, T., and A. Reshef (2013). An international look at the growth of modern finance. Journal of Economic Perspectives 27(2), 73–96. Pierce, J. R., and P. K. Schott (2016). The surprisingly swift decline of US manufacturing employment. American Economic Review 106(7), 1632–1662. Pigou, A. C. (1932). The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed. London: Macmillan. Piketty, T., and E. Saez (2006). The evolution of top incomes: A historical and international perspective. American Economic Review 96(2), 200–205. Pinkham, R. (1999).

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

Unlike many northern, industrial cities that have been declining since the auto age peaked in the 1980s, Bexar County, which encompasses the larger San Antonio metropolitan region, has significantly outpaced the US economy between 1980 and 2008, with a 58 percent faster growth rate.11 This is in part because of the strong financial and insurance sectors, which make up 20 percent of the employment.12 The only declining sector in Bexar County is manufacturing. While US manufacturing employment grew by 25 percent, San Antonio experienced a net loss of 40,000 manufacturing jobs.13 The city was banking on the prospect that the creation of a five-pillar Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure over the next twenty years would put thousands of people back to work—especially in the manufacturing sector and building trades—and provide new vocational opportunities for a fast-growing younger population.

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In the period between 1982 and 2002, US steel production grew from 75 million tons to 102 million tons, while the number of steel workers declined from 289,000 to 74,000.7 This kind of dramatic productivity gain is reverberating across the manufacturing sector as intelligent technology replaces mass human labor on the factory floor. Even in the poorest countries, the cheapest workers are not as cheap or as efficient as the intelligent technology replacing them. If the current trend continues—and it’s likely only to accelerate with even more efficient technology displacement—global manufacturing employment is estimated to decrease from 163 million workers to just a few million workers by 2040, eliminating most factory jobs around the world.8 White-collar and service industries are experiencing similar dramatic gains in productivity and shedding record numbers of workers in the process. Secretaries, file clerks, bookkeepers, telephone operators, and bank tellers are among the scores of traditional white-collar jobs that have become virtually extinct with the introduction of intelligent technology.

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City
by Mike Davis
Published 27 Aug 2001

Boricuans were, so to speak, standing on the track bend at when Industrial Restructuring came around the 100 miles per hour. "The nine cities where the majority of US Puerto Ricans lived in 1980 lost almost one million manufac- turing jobs between 1963 and 1982, representing a 44 percent loss of manufacturing employment." Robert Suro summarizes a consensus of research on the recent economic history of New York City: When New York's industrial economy sank, the Puerto Ricans sank with it. During the 1970s, family income for Puerto Rican ers dropped by 18% and other To make matters worse for Puerto Hispanics experienced gains.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
by Noam Chomsky
Published 6 Sep 2011

Such policies are naturally welcomed by the manufacturing and financial institutions that are extending their control over the global economy, with the assistance of mislabeled “free trade” agreements. NAFTA is expected to drive large numbers of farm workers off the land, contributing to rural misery and surplus labor. Manufacturing employment, which declined under the reforms, is expected to fall more sharply. A study by Mexico’s leading business journal, El Financiero, predicted that Mexico would lose almost a quarter of its manufacturing industry and 14 percent of its jobs in the first two years. “Economists predict that several million Mexicans will probably lose their jobs in the first five years after the accord takes effect,” Tim Golden reported in the New York Times.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson
Published 1 Jan 2006

This period saw the completion of expressways that opened up suburban acreage to industrial development. New York’s high electricity costs pushed out some factories. The general shift of population to the South and West accelerated, leaving New York factories poorly situated to serve expanding markets. The economic downturn of the early 1970s contributed to a fall in manufacturing employment nationwide, and New York’s outmoded factories, often housed in antiquated buildings with little land on which to expand or rebuild, bore the brunt of this shrinkage. There can be no doubt, however, that containerization eliminated one of the key reasons for operating a factory in New York City: ease of shipment.

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This used to be impossible: high transportation costs acted as a trade barrier, very similar in effect to high tariffs on imports, sheltering the jobs of production workers from foreign competition but imposing higher prices on consumers. As the container made international transportation cheaper and more dependable, it lowered that barrier, decimating manufacturing employment in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, by making it much easier for manufacturers to go overseas in search of low-cost inputs. The labor-intensive assembly will be done in a low-wage country—but there are many low-wage countries. The various components and raw materials will come from whichever location can supply them most cheaply—but costs in different locations often are quite similar.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

I have also argued elsewhere that the Kuznets curve could be logically extended to all periods of rapid technological change where a growing sector and its impact on the composition of the labor force would push inequality up. 35 Thus, the increase of inequality in Western countries in the 1980s and 1990s could be seen as just another Kuznets wave, not dissimilar to the one Kuznets described at mid-century. Substitute service-sector employment for manufacturing employment, and manufacturing employment for agricultural employment, and one gets a new version of how the transfer of labor to an inherently more productive and diverse sector offering a greater variety of wage rates (in this case, the service sector) explains the increase in inequality. The forces that would overturn this development are not as clear as in the original case, but one could argue that with passage of time and increased competition there might be a dissipation of the high rents accruing to the companies and company owners who lead the technological change.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

In The Wealth of Nations he predicted that machines would allow ‘one man to do the work of many’ and that would drive up productivity and profits. This, in turn, would stimulate the demand for more labour, because it allowed owners to hire more people and build more factories. Research from Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels has found that, while manufacturing employment has fallen in most developed countries between 1996 and 2012, it has fallen less sharply where investment in robotics has been greatest. 4 ‘Automation and anxiety’, The Economist, 25 June 2016. 5 According to Martin Ford, futurist and author of the award winning book Rise of the Robots it won’t happen immediately but within a decade or so. 6 Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work, March 2017, Centre for Global Policy Solutions. 7 Mark Fahey, ‘Driverless cars will kill the most jobs in select US states’, www.cnbc.com, 2 September 2016. 8 ‘Real wages have been falling for longest period for at least 50 years, ONS says’, Guardian, 31 January 2014.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
by Dean Baker
Published 1 Jan 2011

Most of the bilateral trade deals have been delayed for years, and the Doha round of the World Trade Organization has now been delayed for more than a decade. To make trade deals more palatable to the U.S. public, negotiators have sought to include labor rights and other provisions that might reduce the negative impact that the deals would have on manufacturing employment in the United States and improve conditions for workers in our trading partners. However, labor rights and worker protection provisions would have at best a marginal effect on reversing the extent to which trade policy redistributes income upward. As a result of current trade policy, U.S. manufacturers already have access to a vast pool of relatively low-paid workers in China, India, and elsewhere in the developing world.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

The global profits of many Western managers and investors depend in large part on the labor of poor women in foreign sweatshops, as Delia Aquilar observes: “From the maquiladoras in Mexico . . . to assembly plants and export processing zones [EPZs] in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Rim, to subcontractors and garment sweatshops in global cities and in nations of the periphery, it is women’s labor that allows and guarantees maximum profitability for the corporate elite, a tiny minority of the world’s inhabitants.”15 The economist David Autor and several coauthors have shown that “the China shock”—the flood of Chinese imports into the US following China’s entry into the WTO—did far more damage to US manufacturing employment than the previous consensus had held, destroying 2 million to 2.4 million net jobs in manufacturing and manufacturing-related industries between 1999 and 2011 and contributing to the “employment sag” in the US in that period.16 A study in 2013 by Michael W. L. Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Aysegul Sahin concluded that “increases in the import exposure of US businesses can account for 3.3 percentage points of the 3.9 percentage point decline in the US payroll share over the past quarter century.”17 * * * — AMONG MULTINATIONAL FIRMS, Apple in particular has mastered the arts of tax, regulatory, and labor arbitrage.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

China’s growth was a mixed blessing: even as China provided American consumers with a cornucopia of cheap consumer goods, it deprived many American workers of their jobs. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have calculated that imports from China explained 21 percent of the decline in manufacturing employment during the years 1990 to 2007—or the loss of 1.5 million jobs. In particular, America’s decision to establish normal trade relations with China in 2001 was followed, in short order, by both a surge in imports from China and an unusually large fall in manufacturing employment. These job losses were concentrated among low-skilled workers who had little chance of getting equally well-paid jobs in the future: for example, the clothing industry lost about half a million jobs in the years 1995 to 2005.2 China’s challenge was existential as well as just commercial.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

ICI adopted a version of Alfred Sloan’s multidivisional structure (see chapter 6), employed an army of professional managers, developed close links with the country’s universities, and began to take the battle to Du Pont. By 1935, it had around fifty thousand workers, the same number as Guest Keen & Nettlefold, an emerging metals and engineering giant. Yet, Britain’s biggest manufacturing employer, with sixty thousand workers, was Unilever. Lever Brothers remained firmly under the thumb of William Lever until his death in 1925. Lever’s road to greatness allegedly began in the 1880s, when he heard a customer ask whether the shop had any more of his “stinking soap”: Sunlight soap built the firm, not to mention Port Sunlight.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It)
by Elizabeth S. Anderson
Published 22 May 2017

Finally, in the United States through the early years of the nineteenth century, skilled journeymen enjoyed a reasonable expectation of being able to set up shop for themselves after a few years of wage labor, in the manner Lincoln thought was the norm. With such a short, easy bridge from one rank to the next, it was relatively easy for workers to reconcile the hierarchy that did exist with egalitarian republican values.96 The Industrial Revolution dramatically widened the gulf between employers and employees in manufacturing. Employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all. Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled. Ranks within the firm multiplied. Leading executives might not even work in the same building. This facilitated a severe degradation of working conditions.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

Many aspects of R&D, product design and technical testing are now looked after by separate companies, along with lots of accounting, logistics, cleaning, personnel management and IT services. A study published in 2015 by the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, reckoned that the 11.5m American jobs counted as manufacturing employment in 2010 were outnumbered almost two to one by jobs in manufacturing-related services: added, the total would be 32.9m. In future, service providers will penetrate even deeper into manufacturers’ turf, even as manufacturers come to see themselves increasingly as sellers of services. Industrial machines and the goods they turn out are increasingly packed with internet-connected sensors.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness
by Dan Dimicco
Published 3 Mar 2015

In practice, it means a North Carolina textile worker who a few years ago made $15 an hour sewing blankets at a mill is now making $10 an hour as a cook at a county jail. We see stories like that all the time. I mention textiles in particular because as recently as a decade ago it was one of the largest manufacturing employers in the state. But North Carolina apparel makers have been destroyed by cheap foreign imports. The United States has lost nearly a million textile jobs since 1999. Why do we put up with this? Construction and manufacturing are the sectors where the economy is bleeding jobs and where we have the greatest need.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
Published 27 Dec 2008

See also, Anne H. Gauthier, Timothy M. Smeeding, and Frank F. Fursten berg, Jr., “Are Parents Investing Less Time in Children? Trends in Selected Industrialized Countries,” Population and Development Review 30, no. 4 (December 2004): 647-71. 2. David Brauer, “What Accounts for the Decline in Manufacturing Employment?” figure 3. U.S. Congressional Budget Office, February 2004. See also, U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs, “A Service Economy,” U.S.A. Economy in Brief at http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/economy-in-brief/pag e3.html. 3. “Income Inequality Measures,” in Luxembourg Income Study, May 27, 2003, at http://www.lisproject.org/keyfigures/ineqtable.htm. 4.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

THE BIGGEST TRANSFORMATION OF ALL If the context of this book is the sweeping shift from products to services in retail, transportation, media, and technology, as well as the changes in business mindsets that this shift requires, then the industry that stands to benefit the most from that transformation is manufacturing. That may sound surprising. We’ve all been told that the global economy is shifting away from hard goods. Manufacturing as a percentage of the US GDP peaked in the 1950s, and manufacturing employment has been in steady decline since the late nineties. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, today overall employment in manufacturing in the United States is at the same level as it was before the country entered the Second World War. Almost a third of the workforce was building things in factories in the early fifties—today it’s a little under 9 percent.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

The center-right had no intention of working with the SAP, and worker and agrarian parties were often at loggerheads, not just in Sweden but throughout much of Western Europe during this period. The SAP, which was organically linked to trade unions, was determined to maintain high wages in industry and expand manufacturing employment. Trade unions viewed higher food prices as undermining these plans, for they would raise the cost of the much-needed government programs and erode the real take-home pay of workers. Agrarian interests prioritized higher food prices and did not want the government’s resources to be directed toward industrial programs.

…

Automation, on the other hand, has concentrated in higher-value-added and higher-wage manufacturing sectors, such as cars, electronics, metals, chemicals, and office work. It is the dwindling of this latter set of jobs that has played a more central role in the surge in inequality. As a result, although competition from China and other low-wage countries has reduced overall manufacturing employment and depressed wage growth, it has been the direction of technological change that has been the major driver of wage inequality. These technology and trade trends have sometimes devastated local communities as well. Many areas in the industrial heartland of the United States, such as Flint and Lansing in Michigan, Defiance in Ohio, and Beaumont in Texas, used to specialize in heavy industry and offered employment opportunities to tens of thousands of blue-collar workers.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

And in 2002, the Bush administration imposed heavy duties on imports of foreign steel. The US. has too much sovereignty for the rest of the world's good. None of this is intended to deny that plant relocations to Mexico and outsourcing contracts in China have put a sharp squeeze on U.S. manufacturing employment and earnings, or that the threat of those things has gready reduced the bargaining power of U.S. workers. But how much has this contributed to downward mobihty and increasing stress? The econo-metricians say that trade explains, at most, about 20-25% of the decHne in the U.S. real hourly wage during the 1970s and 1980s.While not insignificant, that still leaves 75—80% to be explained, and the main culprits there are mainly of domestic origin.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

As Americans start to read the market signals and retrain to enter new exciting areas of the economy, they will regain a competitive advantage over Chinese or Indian workers. We heard this view from Thomas Friedman in our earlier discussion, given a belief that there are no limits to the number of idea-generating jobs that could be created to compensate for those lost to Asia, even if there are limits to the expansion of manufacturing employment. But where are these new jobs? They depend on an article of faith rather than hard evidence. It was difficult to find much support for a significant, let alone exponential, increase in demand for high-skill workers in new innovative fields even when the American economy was booming. Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ estimate that most of the jobs with the fastest growth rate will require a bachelor’s degree, most people will continue to work in occupations that require low levels of education and training.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

Seoul, already possessing a critical mass of population and basic infrastructure, quickly emerged as the focal point for these industries, with industrial estates like Guro established by the government in the city to help spur the growth of a manufacturing economy.25 Trouble, however, soon began to emerge. While Seoul was experiencing robust growth in manufacturing employment, the population of the city was growing at a much faster rate, leading to mass urban poverty.26 In 1970, the fertility rate in South Korea was still around five children per woman. With life expectancy fast improving, the result was very high rates of population growth. Agricultural yields, while improving, were not doing so quickly enough to feed the booming population in the countryside, leading large numbers of people to move to Seoul out of desperation.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson supports the notion that outsourcing has had a negative impact on US wages. From 1991 to 2007, US imports from China rose from $26 billion to about $330 billion. They find that greater exposure of a region to Chinese imports predicts weak performance in manufacturing employment, weak wage performance, and, in those same regions, a growing demand for transfer payments (“handouts”) from the government. Another recent study, by Runjuan Liu and Daniel Trefler, finds further evidence of job market problems from outsourcing. They found that “downward occupational switching,” meaning people took lower-paid jobs in less lucrative sectors, went up by 17 percent among affected groups, transitions to unemployment increased by 0.9 percentage points, and the earnings of affected “occupational stayers” fell by 2.3 percent.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

“Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Finance Industry: 1909–2006.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 127 (November): 1551–1609. Phillips-Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: Norton. Pierce, Justin R., and Peter K. Schott. 2016. “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment.” American Economic Review 106 (7) (July): 1632–1662. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinto, Nick. 2015. “The Bail Trap.” New York Times, August 13. Piore, Michael J., and Sean Stafford. 2006. “Changing Regimes of Workplace Governance, Shifting Axes of Social Mobilization and the Challenge to Industrial Relations Theory.”

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets
by Michael Blastland
Published 3 Apr 2019

Available at: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/publications. 16 Sarah O’Connor, ‘The Best Economist is One with Dirty Shoes’, Financial Times, 19 July 2016. 17 The discussion of trade in this chapter is based on the work of David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, to whom I am indebted. See especially their article ‘The China Shock: Learning from Labour Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade’, Annual Review of Economics, vol. 8, 2016, pp. 205–240. See also Justin Pierce and Peter Schott, ‘The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment’, American Economic Review, vol. 106, no. 7, 2016, pp. 1632–1662. 18 Note: shares of manufacturing exports, not overall manufacturing totals. 19 China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001, which seems to have reassured overseas investors that its intentions to trade were long term. 20 See especially Jonathan Rothwell, ‘Cutting the Losses: Reassessing the Costs of Import Competition to Workers and Communities’, 19 October 2017, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2920188.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

,” Economist, March 12, 2015. 177 created incentives for firms to onshore production: European Union: Flavia Rotondi, Piotr Skolimowski, Jeannette Neumann, and Joao Lima, “Europe Finds It’s Not So Easy to Say Goodbye to Low-Cost China,” Bloomberg, June 29, 2020; Japan: Isabel Reynolds and Emi Urabe, “Japan to Fund Firms to Shift Production out of China,” Bloomberg, April 8, 2020. 177 tax breaks to American exporters: “Companies Get Leniency in Made-in-America Export Tax Break,” Bloomberg, March 4, 2019. 178 decline sharply since the 1950s and ’60s: See St. Louis Fed for US data, https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manufacturing-really-declining; and decline since 1960 for other developed countries: Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-manufacturing-employment-in-high-income-countries-1960–2011. 178 “Made in the USA” version of the same pants costs about $350: Dana Varinsky, “Here’s What 5 of Your Favorite Products Would Cost if They Were Made in the US,” Business Insider, November 27, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-products-would-cost-if-made-in-us-2016-11#jeans-2. 178 Smoot-Hawley Tariffs: Chad P.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

The data on lost jobs come from the ‘Job openings and labor turnover survey’ from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, 67.9 million jobs disappeared and 70 million new ones were created. 36. Ildikó Magyari, ‘Firm reorganization, Chinese imports, and US manufacturing employment’, Job Market Paper, 2017. 37. Nicholas Bloom, Mirko Draca, and John Van Reenen, ‘Trade induced technical change? The impact of Chinese imports on innovation, IT and productivity’, Review of Economic Studies, vol.83, no.1, 2016. 38. Zhi Wang, Shang-Jin Wei, Xinding Yu, Kunfu Zhu, ‘Re-examining the effects of trading with China on local labor markets: A supply chain perspective’, NBER working paper no.24886, 2018. 39.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

Mass production is now so common it is invisible. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Wal-Mart is the largest corporation in the world, by annual sales ($300bn in 2005/6) and by employee numbers. With nearly 2 million workers it is vastly larger not only than the biggest firms of 1900, but also than the very largest manufacturing employers of the 1960s. But it is a retailer, not a manufacturer. Indeed it indirectly employs many more millions, largely in China, mass producing all sorts of stuff for the American consumer. IKEA, again principally a retailer and designer, controls the mass manufacture of furniture, indirectly employing an estimated 1 million workers.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

In Greece, unemployment was the highest in the European Union and rose at some low points to more than 30 per cent of the adult population. In much of the democratic world there has been an accelerating increase in service-sector employment, both in low-skilled customer-service work and in high-skilled knowledge occupations, and a corresponding drop in manufacturing employment. This has contributed to a polarization of the workforce in many countries, with more high-skilled and low-skilled jobs, but fewer requiring mid-level skills. At the same time, young people are finding it increasingly hard to get a foothold in the labour market, and the proportion of the workforce employed on full-time permanent contracts has shrunk.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

But two other, much less publicised, events took place in that year that set the stage for a profound quarter-century of adjustment for Britain, and in particular London. The first, only retrospectively perceptible, development that occurred in 1966 was that Britain reached its peak of industrial employment (Townsend, 1997: 82). Manufacturing employment reached a historic high of 8.7 million, comprising 34.9 per cent of employment, a proportion exceeded only by West Germany among the major world economies. Over the following 20 years, the country was to experience one of the largest and most rapid proportional declines in industrial employment of any industrialised country.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Adrian Wood, a British economist, argued a decade and a half after the Great Divergence began that trade with low-wage countries was lowering wages for unskilled workers in developed countries. “There is a clear inverse association,” Wood wrote in a 1995 paper. “Countries with larger increases in import penetration experienced larger falls in manufacturing employment.” But in the United States, Wood had to concede, imports of manufactured goods from low-wage countries still totaled less than 3 percent of gross domestic product. By itself, that wasn’t enough to displace many workers. Wood answered by arguing that the effects were subtle and indirect. For example, he wrote that imports from low-wage countries required more labor than other goods, and therefore displaced more U.S. workers than did imports from high-wage countries.6 Most leading economists in the United States didn’t buy it.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

Readers in rich economies will be well aware of the phenomenon – the loss of manufacturing work to other locations – that hollowed out once-great cities like Detroit. Britain, the first industrializer, was the first to face this particular ill, quite early in the twentieth century. Over time, the bug affected more industries in more corners of the rich world: in America, for instance, manufacturing employment peaked as a share of total employment in the early 1940s and declined at a remarkably steady rate thereafter; but there have been particularly nasty spells of employment loss along the way – in the early 1980s, for instance (when Reagan and Thatcher earned the ire of many blue-collar workers) and then in the 2000s.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

City Challenge emphasised ‘partnership’ – strengthened links between local councils and local businesses and close collaboration with education and training providers. Of course, all this was to fit the local community to the new economy; predominantly lower-paid, less regular and non-unionised service industries. This all implicitly acknowledged that there would be no return to the traditional manufacturing employment that had been the mainstay of many ‘respectable’ working-class communities in the past. The process itself was also, in Conservative terms, businesslike. Initially, fifteen local authorities were invited to apply for funds in a competitive public bidding process (two more participated uninvited).

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

Manufacturing became less visible not because it produced less, but because it employed many fewer people, and because it was a smaller part of the economy. There was nothing uniquely British about this development. Nearly all rich countries saw increases in manufacturing output, falls in manufacturing employment and falls in manufacturing as a proportion of GDP. However, in the 1950s and 1960s the United Kingdom was clearly a nation with an especially heavy bias towards manufacturing (comparable only to Germany). By the 1990s it was a nation with a comparatively weak manufacturing sector. It was not like Germany and Japan; it was now clearly much more like the USA or France.

…

Far from releasing the innovative energies of the private sector, what happened was that companies no longer felt obliged to do research for national reasons, and national champions and their R&D programmes went by the board. She may have been a nationalist, and a scientist, but she presided over the end of significant British techno-nationalism. As well as falling manufacturing employment the other obvious change has been that the United Kingdom became a net importer of manufactures. This was a shocking development for the former workshop of the world, but more especially for those brought up on the notion that a net positive manufacturing balance was needed to then import food and raw materials.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

Indeed, we have seen that even in the Swedish context, trade unions have at times pushed for excessively high wages. This suspicious attitude is more than shared by many policy makers in the United States, who have sought to undermine the power of unions. Partly as a result of these policy attitudes (and partly because of the decline of manufacturing employment), today union membership is much lower in the U.S. economy, especially in the private sector, than it was in the heyday of labor unions in midcentury, after the rights of workers to organize in unions, engage in collective bargaining, and go on strike were recognized with the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935.

…

For example, while the (inflation-adjusted) earnings of men with postgraduate education increased by almost 60 percent since 1980, those of men with high school education or less declined by more than 20 percent. In the course of the last three and a half decades, the real take-home pay of less skilled workers has fallen precipitously. The same period has also witnessed declining job creation in the American economy. U.S. manufacturing employment fell by about 25 percent from the mid-1990s, while the overall employment-to-population ratio has declined significantly since 2000. Similar trends are visible in several other advanced economies, even if the staggering decline in the real earnings of less educated workers is unique to the U.S. labor market.

The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future
by Michael Levi
Published 28 Apr 2013

Moreover, as the cost of clean energy falls, including as a result of government support, the possibility grows that the benefits of shifting toward it will outweigh the associated costs. Making the case that clean energy delivers benefits in excess of its costs, though, requires a careful look at the benefits that clean energy can deliver. Exhibit A, for many enthusiasts, has been jobs. m m m Manufacturing employment has been in a free fall for decades. Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh, is no exception. During the first ten years of the twenty-first century, nearly a third of all manufacturing jobs in the area vanished, tracking the trend in the country at large.52 When FLABEG, a large German maker of automotive mirrors (look for their stamp on your rearview mirror the next time you drive), announced in November 2011 that it would be closing its Brackenridge plant, the news wasn’t surprising.53 Ten miles down the road in Clinton, though, the same company is writing a different story.

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It)
by William Poundstone
Published 5 Feb 2008

I say, 'Buddy, I don't give a shit.' He says, 'No, I want to get it right.' So he reads the whole fucking thing. And then he says he may want to change a few phrases.") As David Duke became a national celebrity, the questions got tougher. On Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked, "Me. Duke, can you name the top three manufacturing employers in Louisiana?" Duke couldn't. After an uncomfortable silence, he said, "We have a number of employers in our state. I couldn't give you the names right off." The next question was how many people in Louisiana lived below the poverty line. Duke didn't know that, either. "I don't carry around an almanac with me."

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

Atzema et al., “Effect of Marriage on Duration of Chest Pain Associated with Acute Myocardial Infarction before Seeking Care,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 183, no. 13 (2011): 1482–1491. Statisticians Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee: Bernard Cohen and I-Sing Lee, “A Catalog of Risks,” Health Physics 36, no. 6 (1979): 707–722. THE NEW AMERICAN MATRIARCHY THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS A SEX CHANGE Since 2000, the manufacturing economy: Total manufacturing employment in the United States was 17.3 million in January 2000, and hit a low of fewer than 11.5 million in January 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2011, the number of manufacturing jobs grew by 1.2 percent, the industry’s first increase since 1997. The housing bubble masked this new reality: Lawrence Katz, “Long-Term Unemployment in the Great Recession,” Testimony for the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, April 29, 2010. http://www.employmentpolicy.org/topic/10/research/long-term-unemployment-great-recession-0.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

Meanwhile, in India, hundreds of millions of people will move from its backward rural economy and informal urban economy into the global wage-labour market. There is little prospect of a global labour shortage pushing up wages in rich countries for many years to come. China’s industrialisation surge has accompanied a sharp decline in manufacturing employment in industrialised countries, particularly since the financial crash. Between 2008 and 2015, the USA lost over 6 million manufacturing jobs. But now over half of China’s output is attributable to services, including financial services. It and Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore have become rentier economies, with the means to invest in rich countries and buy up companies and other assets.

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together
by Andrew Selee
Published 4 Jun 2018

One study estimates that 85 percent of the job losses in manufacturing stem from automation, with another 13 percent tied to trade and offshoring of production. Other studies see slightly higher losses from trade and offshoring, but they point out that trade with Mexico, unlike with other countries, has a negligible—and very likely a positive—effect on American manufacturing employment because of the integration effects. Yet there are elements of a NAFTA renegotiation that could strengthen the job-creating effects of integration and mitigate the job-loss effects. One of these would be to ensure that the Mexican government enforces its own labor laws by allowing industrial workers to form independent unions.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

The historic growth of this low-wage servant economy characterized the labor market during both the Obama and Trump administrations. The advent of a low-wage economy alongside service sector growth presents the impression that these phenomena are inherently intertwined. We’re nostalgic for manufacturing employment, which is imagined to be, by default, solid, well-paid work. Such logic suggests there is nothing that policymakers can do to change the poor conditions of service jobs—it’s just the inevitable result of deindustrialization. In fact, there’s nothing inherent to service work that makes it so bad.

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future
by Levi Tillemann
Published 20 Jan 2015

Today automotive manufacturing accounts for almost $3 trillion of economic output—more than the economy of Brazil. And the automobile’s importance to growth, trade, innovation, military technology, and the environment is, for practical purposes, immeasurable. The industry is a point of national pride, a center for manufacturing employment, and an instrument of state power for the world’s most technologically advanced economies—much more so than most people realize. Now, just as in Ford’s time, the ether is tinged with implacable change. The question is not if, but who and how soon? Empires—both corporate and political—are in a Great Race to build the car of the future.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Or was it sinister Chinese, manipulating their currency? Chinese labour costs were so low that, once the country joined the global trading system, it quickly grabbed market share in low-cost manufactured goods. Americans routinely complain that everything they buy seems to be made in China. Manufacturing employment in China surged. The result was one of the biggest migrations in history as rural workers moved to the big cities. Much of the rest of the world may have abandoned the Bretton Woods approach but China did not. The Chinese Communist party had no intention of letting their interest or exchange rates be controlled by the markets; they opted for capital controls and a managed currency, pegged to the dollar.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

We have all been feeling the ripple effects of the innovation shortfall. In 1999, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that 2.8 million new jobs would be created over the next decade in “leading edge” industries such as IT, aerospace, telecom, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing. Employment in this space would grow at 3.4 percent, twice as fast as the rest of the private economy. It never happened. In fact, leading edge industries lost 68,000 jobs over that decade. Even those of us who have jobs have not seen significant enough wage increases. As a consequence of the failure of innovation, Thiel points to the fact that real median wages have, at best, risen by 10 percent since 1973 according to government data.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
by William R. Easterly
Published 1 Aug 2002

The 1993 Human Development Report expressed the same concern about this ”problem” of jobless growth, which wasespecially severe in developing countries between 1960 and 1973: ”GDP growth rates were fairly high, but employment growth rates were less than half this.”ll Similarly, a study of Vietnam in 2000 lamented the slow growth of manufacturing employment relative to manufacturing output.12 The authors of all these reports forgot that having GDP rise faster than employment is called growth of income per worker, which happens to be the only way that workers’ “very low incomes” can increase.13 Transitions Increases in machinery per worker could not be asource of long-run growth, but they could be a source of growth in the transition to the long-run path.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

But they are now counted as part of service output, rather than of manufacturing output. In addition, seeing the share of manufacturing in their output falling, some manufacturing firms have applied to be reclassified as service firms, even though they still conduct some manufacturing. A UK government report estimates that up to 10 per cent of the fall in manufacturing employment between 1998 and 2006 in the UK may be due to this ‘reclassification effect’.7 Making things still matters The view that the world has now entered a new era of the ‘knowledge economy’, in which making things does not confer much value, is based upon a fundamental misreading of history.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

Or he could use his seniority to try to transfer to a GM plant elsewhere. But he and his wife are loath to take either option, as it would mean giving up the extensive network of support—at school, through local services—they’ve painstakingly built up for their daughter.2 Marsh’s story is a common one. America’s manufacturing employment remains well below the levels seen before NAFTA, the WTO agreement, and the other corporation-friendly trade deals that kicked the legs out from under Marsh’s industry and so many others. The financial crisis didn’t help either. Americans lost 212,000 telecommunications jobs and 122,000 manufacturing jobs in the eight years following 2008.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

According to a Global Urban Development report, “More training centers were geared towards the higher-skilled industries such as electronics,” and a new education system was installed, “to ensure that Singapore could form a very high quality and skilled workforce out of the universities and yet at the same time, ensuring that technical training was still available to those who could not excel in the formal education system.”28 Again, the system worked. While its share of manufacturing employment dropped, the services sector in the next few decades rapidly grew, contributing a fifth to GDP in the early 1980s, but almost a third by the mid-2010s. By 2015, Singapore had a GDP per capita exceeding that of both Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, and the US, the wealthiest nation on earth.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

According to a Global Urban Development report, “More training centers were geared towards the higher-skilled industries such as electronics,” and a new education system was installed, “to ensure that Singapore could form a very high quality and skilled workforce out of the universities and yet at the same time, ensuring that technical training was still available to those who could not excel in the formal education system.”28 Again, the system worked. While its share of manufacturing employment dropped, the services sector in the next few decades rapidly grew, contributing a fifth to GDP in the early 1980s, but almost a third by the mid-2010s. By 2015, Singapore had a GDP per capita exceeding that of both Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, and the US, the wealthiest nation on earth.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Downtown Oakland “became packed with a bustling twenty-four-hour street scene,” writes scholar Chris Rhomberg. “Theaters and cafes stayed open all night to accommodate the swing shift, and dance halls, taverns, and other amusements sprang up to appeal to war workers with disposable income.”41 But as shipbuilding declined with the end of the war, black workers were among the first fired: Manufacturing employment in Oakland fell by 70 percent between August of 1945 and February of 1946.ix42 Like the white space settlers, these black Okies were younger and better educated than most people in the communities they’d left, and when the shipbuilding industry in San Francisco and the East Bay could no longer absorb them, thousands tried their luck in the South Bay.

…

IBM took it a step further and spun off a whole contract manufacturing firm, Celestica, in 1997.21 In the ’90s, while Santa Clara County’s overall numbers dazzled, its manufacturing wages declined, including in the electronic equipment sector.22 Firms outsourced high-wage work, too; the famous Palo Alto industrial design consultancy IDEO opened in 1991, encouraging tech start-ups to further narrow their focus, and discount imitators followed. One analysis found that likely well over half—up to 80 percent—of the county’s employment growth between 1984 and 1997 came in the form of externally contracted workers.23 And those were the jobs kept onshore; statewide, electric and electronic manufacturing employment fell 38.7 percent between 1980 and 1995.24 The issue wasn’t just that capitalists were thriving while their workers suffered; with output growth stalled, it was all about the split. Capitalists were winning because their workers were losing, a reality well camouflaged by the whiz-bang excitement Silicon Valley produced.

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
by William Julius Wilson
Published 1 Jan 1996

By 1987, industrial employment in this group had fallen to 31 percent. Of those born between 1956 and 1960, 52 percent worked in these industries as late as 1978. But again, by 1987 industrial employment in this group fell to 28 percent. No other male ethnic group in the inner city experienced such an overall precipitous drop in manufacturing employment (see Appendix C). These employment changes have accompanied the loss of traditional manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs in Chicago. As a result, young black males have turned increasingly to the low-wage service sector and unskilled laboring jobs for employment, or have gone jobless.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson
Published 31 Jul 2016

As one of its most zealous advocates, Madsen Pirie, the head of a free-market think tank, declaimed in 1988, “The privatization programme in Britain probably marked the largest transfer of power and property since the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.” Some 650,000 workers were forcibly moved from state employment into the private economy as the role of state-owned enterprises faded away. The industrial sector, deprived of taxpayer subsidies, shrank quickly as marquee names closed unprofitable operations. Manufacturing employment, 30 percent of the workforce in 1979, fell to 22 percent under Thatcher as the United Kingdom shifted decisively to a service economy. Well beyond the mineworkers, the trades union movement lost power, weakened not only by changes in labor law, but also by the rapid erosion of the industries that had formed its base for more than a century.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

In the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s government perceived trade unions as one of the biggest internal threats, and took steps to significantly weaken their power. Between 1979 and 1988, union membership declined 20 per cent, thanks to government policies – combined with economic hardship and a decline in manufacturing employment. The US was on a similar trajectory. In 1981, the newly elected Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers and replaced them with non-union members. It marked a turning point in the history of American trade unionism. As a result, there was little unionisation in the early tech industry.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

The ‘winners’ are those who work in the industries that are expanding because a country is specializing in that sector and exporting from it. As US imports of manufactured goods have increased, mid-skilled jobs in that sector have been disappearing. After growing from 13 million jobs in 1950 to peak at nearly 20 million in 1980, 2010 saw a drop to a historic low of about 11.5 million. A rebound since the recession has taken manufacturing employment up to around 12.3 million, although this is still lower than in 1950. It’s a similar pattern in the UK. Around 2.6 million people work in manufacturing, a figure that has halved since the late 1970s. Manufacturing accounts for 8 per cent of all jobs, down from a quarter in 1978. This combination of factors has resulted in a lack of improvement in living standards for many Americans in the middle of the income distribution, and it’s a big part of the dissatisfaction with the status quo expressed in the last election.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

The ‘winners’ are those who work in the industries that are expanding because a country is specializing in that sector and exporting from it. As US imports of manufactured goods have increased, mid-skilled jobs in that sector have been disappearing. After growing from 13 million jobs in 1950 to peak at nearly 20 million in 1980, 2010 saw a drop to a historic low of about 11.5 million. A rebound since the recession has taken manufacturing employment up to around 12.3 million, although this is still lower than in 1950. It’s a similar pattern in the UK. Around 2.6 million people work in manufacturing, a figure that has halved since the late 1970s. Manufacturing accounts for 8 per cent of all jobs, down from a quarter in 1978. This combination of factors has resulted in a lack of improvement in living standards for many Americans in the middle of the income distribution, and it’s a big part of the dissatisfaction with the status quo expressed in the last election.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism
by Harm J. De Blij
Published 15 Nov 2007

West African desertification, Asian economic integration, Indonesian transmigration. Others take a more specific look at such American phenomena as professional football and the sources and team destinations of players, the changing patterns of church membership and evangelism, the rise of the wine industry in this period of global warming, and the impact of NAFTA on manufacturing employment in the Midwest. I'm always fascinated to read in our professional journals what they're discovering, and as I used to tell my students, the Age of Discovery may be over, but the era of geographic discovery never will be. THE SPATIAL SPECIALIZERS The stirring story of geography's early emergence, its Greek and Roman expansion, its European diversification, and its global dissemination is a saga of pioneering observation, heroic exploration, inventive mapmaking, and ever-improving interpretation, discussed in fascinating detail by the discipline's leading historian (Martin, 2005).

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

But, drawing on detailed data from local labor markets in the United States, the authors of “The China Syndrome” argue that globalization, and in particular trade with the mighty Middle Kingdom, are today also having a huge impact on American blue-collar workers: “Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment.” The deleterious effects go beyond those workers who lose their jobs. In communities hit by the China Syndrome, wages fall—particularly, it turns out, outside the manufacturing sector—and some people stop looking for work. The result is “a steep drop in the average earnings of households.”

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 10 Mar 2015

Twenty years later, only the hulking ruins of the plant remain, with EPA signs on the barbed wire fence warning of environmental hazard. But the closing of the Standard Products factory, the Army base, and the gypsum mines were merely the most visible symbols of the town’s pervasive economic collapse. Manufacturing employment in Ottawa County, of which Port Clinton is by far the largest town, plummeted from 55 percent of all jobs in 1965 to 25 percent in 1995 and kept falling.14 Unemployment rose and fell with the national economic tides, but the local booms were never as good as the national booms, and the local hard times were much worse.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

For inscribing cuts like the one shown, up to a dozen cutters might be driven off a single pattern guide. By 1860, the Midwest was a major manufacturing center in its own right, mostly centered around the big Ohio River cities like Cincinnati and Louisville. Chicago was gaining rapidly in population—110,000 to Cincinnati’s 161,000—but Cincinnati still had a nearly six-to-one edge in manufacturing employment. Food processing and its by-products were the largest single industry, but the Midwest was developing a large transport sector: steam engines, steam boats, and, increasingly, rails and rail cars. In the first few decades of the Midwest’s rise as a manufacturing power, the east-west transportation barrier acted like a protective tariff.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

China needs to rebalance its economy through increased consumption, but expansion of domestic consumption in China cannot make up for the drop in economic growth that will follow from continued reductions in investment growth.7 The sums simply do not add up. Productivity growth has decelerated for several years. Manufacturing employment has reached levels where it is difficult to grow by adding more labor to the economy, and the service economy remains ossified. The dependency ratio between the retired and the working population has climbed after decades of a one-child policy that skewed the country’s demographics. The rural–urban labor transfer is largely an exhausted force for rapid growth.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

For a consideration of a swath of potential policy responses, see Yvonne A. Stevens and Gary E. Marchant, “Policy Solutions to Technological Unemployment,” in Surviving the Machine Age, ed. Kevin LaGrandeur and James J. Hughes (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). 11. See Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott, “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment,” American Economic Review 106, no. 7 (2016): 1632–1662; Thomas Kemeny, David Rigby, and Abigail Cooke, “Cheap Imports and the Loss of US Manufacturing Jobs,” World Economy 38, no. 10 (2015): 1555–1573; and William J. Carrington and Bruce Fallick, “Why Do Earnings Fall with Job Displacement?”

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

The Swing Riots The classic account of British agricultural labourers’ reaction to the mechanization of farm work is Captain Swing by Hobsbawm and Rudé (1968); for a more recent account of the use of violence in this period, see Griffin (2010). The Industrial Revolution On the role of the Spinning Jenny in the Industrial Revolution, see Allen (2007). For a history of cotton innovation and the UK in the context of Indian and Chinese cotton production, see Riello (2013). The decline of manufacturing employment Changes in employment for the US are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; for a 100-year view of the US, see Ghanbari and McCall (2016). Arthur Samuel, and the origins of AI On the origins and early development of artificial intelligence, see Nilsson (2009). The original paper by Arthur Samuel on machine learning and the game of checkers is Samuel (1959); for a short survey of Samuel’s contribution, see McCarthy and Feigenbaum (1990).

Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann , Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler
Published 25 Mar 2018

About 90 million vehicles were sold worldwide in 2015 66 mil- lion passenger cars and 24 million commercial vehicles. Of the resulting $2.1 trillion in sales revenue (about 2.8 per cent of global gross domestic product of $73.5 trillion), $481 billion was generated in public revenue. More than 9 million people are employed by vehicle manufacturers, representing more than 6 per cent of the world’s total manufacturing employment. As each direct job gives rise to five more indirect jobs, this industry employs about 60 million people. To continue with the development, production and marketing of vehicles, automotive manufacturers invested a total of about $94 billion in 2015. Despite the innovative power of this industry and its ability to shape its own future, there are many signs that there is a disruption ahead.

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Published 11 Jan 2022

When Hoenig became a voting member of the FOMC in January 1992, the economy was still stagnant. This was the beginning of a period that would coin a new phrase, the “jobless recovery.” Hoenig could see it playing out in his own district. There were signs of strength, with high grain prices and plenty of new home construction. But a continued slump in manufacturing employment was wiping out many of the higher-paying jobs in the Midwest. About one thousand auto workers in Hoenig’s district had recently been laid off. During his first meeting as a voting member, Greenspan asked Hoenig for an update on the midwestern economy. “We think our district is growing somewhat more slowly; it might be described as flat at best,” Hoenig said.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

But it does mean we should think about what the marketplace—and our country—needs to win a conflict fought with algorithms and artificial intelligence. Where we fall short the most—and where China excels—is in producing a large supply of workers with highly specific technical training. In a 2019 survey by the National Association of Manufacturers, almost three in four manufacturing employers cited “the inability to attract and retain a quality workforce” as their most significant business challenge.52 This has led to the so-called trade skills gap, which has left vital manufacturing roles such as machinery and welding unfilled. In fact, Apple’s Tim Cook has explained that tech companies flock to China not because of the low cost of labor—many other countries now manufacture goods more cheaply—but because China possesses such a high concentration of precision technical skills.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

Our legal framework and the way we enforce it has provided more scope here for abuses by the financial sector; for perverse compensation for chief executives; for monopolies’ ability to take unjust advantage of their concentrated power. Yes, the market values some skills more highly than others, and those who have those skills will do well. Yes, globalization and technological advances have led to the loss of good manufacturing jobs, which are not likely ever to come back. Global manufacturing employment is shrinking, simply because of enormous increases in productivity, and America is likely to get a shrinking share of the shrinking number of new jobs. If we do succeed in “saving” these jobs, it may be only by converting higher-paid jobs to lower-paid ones—hardly a long-term strategy. Globalization, and the unbalanced way it has been pursued, has shifted bargaining power away from workers: firms can threaten to move elsewhere, especially when tax laws treat such overseas investments so favorably.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

This applies to Airbus: the precision parts are made in Germany, often by small firms linked to the global production chain through union efforts. Before opening the Alabama assembly plant, Airbus outsourced final assembly of the A320 to Chinese factories. It seems that Alabama was competing not with Germany for the high-wage, high-value jobs, but with China for the relatively low-wage, low-value jobs. In March 2010, manufacturing employment in the United States bottomed out at roughly 11.45 million jobs—down from a high of 19.6 million in 1979. Five years later, 900,000 new factory positions had been created, most of them in southern states. In addition to the aircraft assembly jobs, Alabama’s burgeoning auto parts industry employed 26,000 workers in 2017.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 27 Oct 2020

Moreover, cities that implemented stricter nonpharmaceutical interventions and did so sooner in the course of the epidemic did not fare worse; indeed, their economies bounced back more rapidly after the pandemic was over. For example, reacting ten days earlier with respect to the arrival of the pandemic increased manufacturing employment by 5 percent after the epidemic ended.91 One analysis of the long-term economic impact of pandemics used painstakingly assembled data from twelve European pandemics, ranging from the first attack of the Black Death in the 1340s to the mild H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and including the European cholera epidemic of 1816, the 1918, 1957, and 1968 influenza pandemics, and various other outbreaks.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

The batteries come from a GE plant in Schenectady, New York—a Rust Belt city that was once seen as a relic of an earlier industrial age but that now houses a new GE factory on the site of a former turbine plan, which churns out the batteries twenty-four hours a day. Schenectady, the home of GE’s first research facility in 1900, is once again a growing R&D hub for the company. This has huge implications for the local economy of Schenectady as well as for other such communities around the country. The official figure for US manufacturing employment, 9 percent, belies the true importance of the sector. Manufacturing represents a whopping 69 percent of private-sector R&D spending as well as 30 percent of the country’s productivity growth.49 And, according to US government figures, every $1 of manufacturing activity returns $1.37 to the economy.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

He later wrote, ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’ (Fukuyama, 1992). 17 US Bureau of Labor Statistics website: Workforce Statistics on manufacturing employment; Eurostat website: employment and unemployment database, tables on employment by sex, age and economic activity. 18 World Trade Organisation website: Statistics Database. 19 The policy was relaxed at the end of 2013, and became a two-child policy in October 2015. 20 Bernanke (2005). 21 The fundamental drivers of high saving and weak investment that led to falling real interest rates are a matter for continuing research – see Rachel and Smith (2015). 22 Since the 1980s, it has been possible to measure real interest rates quite accurately by looking at how much governments have to pay to borrow in the form of securities (bonds) on which the returns are indexed to inflation.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

The proportion of Scots living in settlements of over 5,000 rose from 31 per cent in 1831 to almost 60 per cent in 1911. The vast majority of the new urban populations were from the farms, villages and small towns of the Lowland countryside. Fourthly, the first phase of industrialization down to c.1830 had extended manufacturing employment, especially in textiles, in rural areas. During the coal, iron and steel industrialization phase, production concentrated more intensively in the central Lowlands, the Border woollen towns, Dundee, Fife and Midlothian. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Scottish industrial capitalism was its extraordinary concentration.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies
by Judith Stein
Published 30 Apr 2010

Especially after the urban riots, money went disproportionately to blacks in cities that had experienced riots. The original intellectual framework persisted. The programs targeted young people, not adults, and offered cultural training, not jobs. The formulation ignored the structural changes that reduced manufacturing employment in the cities. The Labor Department’s Moynihan report of 1965 concluded that jobs were needed, but this point was overwhelmed by the controversy over the report’s unproven contention that the black family structure was pathological. Whatever the theory, the Democratic Party sponsored programs that increased resources—food, health, education—for African Americans.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe
by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Alex Hyde-White
Published 24 Oct 2016

INDUSTRIAL POLICIES Most advanced countries are in need of a structural transformation of their economy, from the sectors (mostly manufacturing) that were dominant in the past to those that will define the 21st century. Because the pace of productivity increase in manufacturing is greater than that of demand, global manufacturing employment will be decreasing, and because of globalization, the share of this global employment that will be captured by the advanced countries, including those in Europe, will be diminishing. A few countries, like Germany, may be able to maintain a niche, at least for a while, especially if they can manage to have an undervalued currency.

Making Globalization Work
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 16 Sep 2006

Growth in per capita real income fluctuated between 3.5 percent of the 1960s, 3.2 percent of the 1970s, and 2.7 percent of the 1950s. 5.From Instituto Nacional Estadística Geografía e Informática, cited in William C. Gruben, “Was Nafta Behind Mexico’s High Maquiladora Growth?,” Economic and Financial Review (Third Quarter, 2001), pp. 11–21. 6.Overall, employment in the domestic manufacturing sector declined in the decade after NAFTA. Export manufacturing employment increased slightly, but these gains were largely overset by losses of jobs in agriculture, and it was not clear how permanent the jobs created would be: by the end of the first decade, 30 percent of the jobs created in the maquiladora in the early 1990s had disappeared. See Sandra Polaski, “Mexican Employment, Productivity, and Income a Decade after NAFTA,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, brief submitted to the Canadian Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, February 25, 2004. 7.See Gruben, “Was Nafta Behind Mexico’s High Maquiladora Growth?

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

For over two decades Dinh has researched and written on how poor nations can attract manufacturing. “Ethiopia got good results because of the now-deceased prime minister [Meles Zenawi] who went to China to get garment and shoe factories.”83 I asked Dinh if he shared Rodrik’s view that poor nations might need to find a path to development other than manufacturing. “In the U.S., manufacturing employment peaked at twenty million people in 1978,” said Dinh, “and since then, it has shed its low-end industries to focus on higher, more specialized manufacturing. That’s different from Nigeria de-industrializing at 7 or 8 percent (share of manufacturing in GDP) before its manufacturing reached the maturity stage.”

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
by Karl Polanyi
Published 27 Mar 2001

That such a reflux toward the village must have taken place seems to find support also in the fact that no absolute decrease of the rural population was noted. Thus a cumulative unsettling of the population was proceeding as different groups were drawn for varying periods into the sphere of commercial and manufactural employment, and then left to drift back to their original rural habitat. Much of the social damage done to England’s countryside sprang at first from the dislocating effects of trade directly upon the countryside itself. The Revolution in Agriculture definitely antedated the Industrial Revolution. Both enclosures of the common and consolidations into compact holdings, which accompanied the new great advance in agricultural methods, had a powerfully unsettling effect.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

This would be convenient because all of us think we have a solution to socioeconomic problems (and would flatter the nativists, since they only fight for the forgotten), but it has been surprisingly difficult to pin down the evidence. Trump’s victory in 2016 took place in the midst of a rapid economic recovery with declining unemployment. Since 2010, manufacturing employment had increased slightly. States like Georgia and Maryland abandoned the Democrats in the tough times of 2012, but came back in the recovery of 2016. Trump won the Rust Belt, but voters there did not attribute their votes to the economy more in 2016 than in 2012. Neither is it simple to find socioeconomic factors behind Brexit.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Unemployment ran persistently far above the OECD average throughout the 1980s, and long-term joblessness peaked just below 6% of the workforce in 1984 and 1985. However it was measured, the jobless rate was higher in its best year in the 1980s than it was during its worst year of the 1970s. The rise in joblessness was overwhelmingly driven by a contraction in manufacturing employment, with a particularly precipitous decline evident between 1980 and 1982. Most of the jobs that were lost were full-time ones, held by men in unionized factories, and they were concentrated in the Midlands, the North of England, Scotland and Wales. Greater London, by contrast, was spared the worst of the recession.

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

Instead, the Fed set a particular model, derived from Japanese responses to that country’s early-2000s malaise, that could in turn just be imitated in other parts of the world, including Japan. One striking feature was that there was some protectionist edge to the new monetary regimes, in that they were expected to produce currency depreciation and hence gains for exporters and for manufacturing employment. After March 2001, with the Japanese economy in recession and prices falling at faster rates than before, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) had cut its policy rate to zero. Along with this move, the BOJ announced a “quantitative easing policy,” built on three pillars: first, to make the operating target the outstanding balances held by financial institutions at the BOJ; second, to adhere to the new policy until the core consumer price index (excluding food prices) stopped falling; and third, to increase purchases of long-term Japanese government bonds.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd
Published 9 Apr 2014

‘There was nothing then … my mother was desperately poor, and in those days, it was usual to do as you were told.’30 Although the number of domestic servants actually increased between 1921 and 1931, men and women in the towns and cities were increasingly able to find factory work. After a slow post-war start, manufacturing began to expand. Older industries like steel had relied on smaller numbers of skilled workers, but the new manufacturing employers chose to concentrate on consumer goods – tinned foods, fashionable clothes and electrical appliances – produced cheaply and uniformly by using as much mechanization as possible. They didn’t need workers who had served a lengthy apprenticeship, but they did need large numbers of employees to staff their production lines, and young wage-earners, who were cheaper to employ than adults, were suddenly in demand.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

In 2005, there were somewhat more than 100 million workers in services, employed in 16.5 million firms, of which 99.96 per cent were small (49 or fewer workers). The concentration of employment in small firms was even greater than in manufacturing: 96 per cent of workers were employed in small enterprises. Table 5.3 SHARES OF MANUFACTURING EMPLOYMENT BY FIRM-​S IZE IN INDIA AND SELECTED EAST ASIAN ECONOMIES, 2005 (PER CENT) Micro + Small Medium Large (1–​49 workers) (50–​199 workers) (200+ workers) India 84.0 5.5 10.5 South Korea 46.5 23.9 29.6 Taiwan 38.9 21.3 39.8 Malaysia 27.5 19.7 52.8 China 24.8 23.3 51.8 Source: Asian Development Bank (2009).

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

“Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy,” Economist, November 4, 2011, http://www.economist .com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence (accessed July 9, 2013). 6. Ibid. 7. Michaela D. Platzer and Glennon J. Harrison, “The U.S. Automotive Industry: National and State Trends in Manufacturing Employment,” Cornell University ILR School, August 2009, 8, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1671&context=key_work place (accessed July 7, 2013). 8. James Sherk,”Technology Explains Drop in Manufacturing Jobs,” Heritage Foundation, October 12, 2010, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/10/technology-explains-drop-in -manufacturing-jobs (accessed August 10, 2013). 9.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

The four leaders I met were anxious to convince me that Skem’s reputation for bolshy workers was a slander on the town. They handed me a report – ‘Skem: The Broken Promise’ – to which David Sheppard, the Bishop of Liverpool, had written a sombre introduction: Once claiming to offer its people a new and better way of life, [Skelmersdale] now embodies the human results of the collapse of manufacturing employment, the regional and local concentration of economic decline, and the wholesale redundancy of manual and unskilled workers … Skelmersdale is special in being in the travel-to-work area with the highest unemployment rate in the north-west and in having its own story of promises broken and hopes dashed.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

In 1870 just 26 percent of Americans lived in incorporated places with populations of more than 2,500; by 1890, 80 History 35 percent did. During the interval the number of cities with populations exceeding 100,000 increased from fourteen to twenty-eight. The labor force shifted among sectors. While agricultural employment grew slowly, employment in construction, trade, and transportation surged ahead. Manufacturing employment held at 19 percent of the labor force, but rapid productivity gains raised manufacturing output from 33 percent of all commodity output in 1869 to 53 percent in 1894. 6 The urban-industrial transformation of the socioeconomic structure left few people unaffected. Under these dynamic conditions, to adopt new ways of life and new kinds of production was the road to wealth-or, for the less fortunate, at least an avenue of survival.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

To the contrary, in 2015 IBM began to license server and software technology to the Beijing-based Teamsun, a company bent on using IBM’s innovations to build indigenous equivalents. Soon Western companies will seek to be part of Chinese supply chains rather than the reverse. China has enough land, labor, capital, technology, and knowledge to make almost anything and everything. Despite rising wages and growing competition, its manufacturing employment and output continue to grow, while the import share of the components going into its exports is rapidly declining. In other words, it is becoming a more self-reliant manufacturer of higher-value goods. The only way to retain competitive advantage is to make complex products nobody else can (yet).

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Since then, German unemployment has been well below the European average, although that may be down to the country’s success in exporting capital goods to China and the emerging markets, rather than the reforms themselves.11 Attempts to make the labour market flexible led to a long argument about whether it was better to reduce unemployment, even if the only jobs available had lower wages and reduced rights. In the US, such jobs were found in the fast-food sector or in call centres. The problem was tied up with the general decline in manufacturing employment (see Chapter 7), which meant that most new jobs were created in the service sector. One significant component of economic growth in this period was the addition of women to the workforce. In 1948, just over 30% of American adult women worked, but by 2000, the proportion was 60%. (It has dropped back a little, along with male participation, since then.)

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

See Carter Goodrich’s comments in “Population Redistribution: Round Table, Friday Afternoon, May 3, 1935, Conference on Population Studies in Relation to Social Planning,” PAA Records, Box 7, Folder “Annual Meeting May 2, 1935.” 143. On business location, see Daniel B. Creamer, Is Industry Decentralizing? A Statistical Analysis of Locational Changes in Manufacturing Employment, 1899– 1933 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935). Creamer revealed that American industry was moving from city centers to the surrounding towns but was not, on the whole, fundamentally redrawing the economic map of the nation (even as, for example, northern textile firms migrated toward cheaper labor markets in the South). 144.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

For instance, when sterling fell by 20 per cent after being ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, this was followed by four years of manufacturing growth – within a long-term pattern of decline. Then in 1996 and 1997, amid a great City financial boom, sterling rose by 25 per cent and stayed there for over a decade, and suddenly the manufacturing sector started shedding jobs again. Sterling fell after the global financial crisis, which may help explain why manufacturing employment did not fall at a faster pace in the ensuing recession. On this, see Tony Dolphin, ‘Don’t bank on it: the financialisation of the UK economy’, Institute for Public Policy Research, 2012, especially p.36. 7. See, for instance, ‘Time for Change: a New Vision for the British Economy’, Institute for Public Policy Research, August 2017.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

Many migrant workers were accommodated in government-provided hostels because they were unable to afford rent and food.32 Emboldened by weak trade unions, employers increasingly categorised new jobs on production lines as ‘unskilled’ or ‘semi-skilled’, offering less pay than ‘skilled’ work. By 1951 Britain had a million more unskilled workers than in 1911, while the proportion of skilled workers fell from 31 to 25 per cent of the workforce.33 The government’s anti-trade union laws, and their subsidy of new manufacturing employers’ low wages, emboldened other employers to cut wages and erode working conditions. In this situation, welfare agencies placed the onus on young people to select their jobs wisely. ‘It does not follow that a job is a good one because you are going to start at a high wage’, warned Manchester’s juvenile employment bureaux (labour exchanges), in a pamphlet aimed at school leavers.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

White Working-Class Distress The distress and economic dislocation caused by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 came on the heels of decades of deepening economic inequality between those benefiting from the global orientation of the neoliberal order and those who were not. The hemorrhaging of manufacturing employment that had been so manifest a feature of the 1990s and early 2000s continued in the wake of the Great Recession, when 2 million additional jobs disappeared.1 Workers losing jobs who were fortunate enough to get new ones frequently had to work for lower pay.2 Their misfortune was not the lot of those further up the income scale.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

Traditional independent weavers, for example, expanded market share more rapidly than large textile firms in the 1930s.6 Between 1954 and 1971, the number of manufacturing firms in Japan doubled, while increasing by only twenty-two percent over the same period in the United States.7 In 1967, sixteen percent of manufacturing employment in Japan was in firms with fewer than ten workers, whereas the corresponding figure for the United States was only three percent.8 David Friedman has gone so far as to argue that dynamic small businesses, and not the well-known giant corporations, are the essence of the Japanese “miracle.”9 In this respect, Japanese industrial structure would appear to bear many similarities to those of Chinese societies, with their myriad small family businesses.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
by Alain Bertaud
Published 9 Nov 2018

This drastic change in the share of the manufacturing sector over 20 years required an equally drastic change in land use and job location. Manufacturing jobs in Hong Kong were largely replaced by new jobs in the service sector. But the location and land requirements of the service sector are completely different from those of the manufacturing sector. The replacement of manufacturing employment by service employment could not be done simply by replacing factories with office buildings. Instead, because Hong Kong planners were often the lessors of office space (and therefore exposed directly to market pricing), they were able to understand market demands to completely reallocate land use and modify urban transport to adapt to a new spatial pattern of job concentration.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

“European Populism: Trends, Threats and Future Prospects,” Institute for Global Change (website), accessed August 6, 2018, https://institute.global/insight/renewing-centre/european-populism-trends-threats-and-future-prospects. 38. Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo, “The Masking of the Decline in Manufacturing Employment by the Housing Bubble,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 179–200. 39. Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 40. Tito Boeri, Prachi Mishra, Chris Papageorgiou, and Antonio Spilimbergo, “A Dialogue between a Populist and an Economist,” CEPR Discussion Paper No.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin
Published 7 Nov 2017

Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report, 2015–2019 (Executive Summary), http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf. 14. “Total domestic US revenues generated by biotech in 2012 reached at least $324 billion.” Robert Carlson, “Estimating the Biotech Sector’s Contribution to the US Economy,” Nature Biotechnology 34 (2016): 247–355. 15. Manufacturing employment as a share of the total US economy has undergone a steady decline in the past fifty years, dropping from 25 percent in 1960 to under 10 percent in 2010. Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth, “US Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 3–26, Fig. 1. 16.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Goodwin and O. Heath, ‘Brexit Vote Explained: Poverty, Low Skills and Lack of Opportunities’, 31 August 2016, at jrf.org.uk. 12. Halikiopoulou and Vlandas found stronger support for Brexit among people at higher risk of poverty; Becker et al. found low educational attainment, historical dependence on manufacturing employment, low income and high unemployment to be drivers of such support; and Alabrese et al. found Brexit voting to be associated with low educational attainment, poor health and reliance on benefit payments. See, respectively: D. Halikiopoulou and T. Vlandas, ‘Voting to leave: Economic insecurity and the Brexit vote’, in B.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

In places where joblessness is high, policies can do more to encourage job creation, like providing employment tax credits and allowing disabled workers to earn more money before they lose access to their disability insurance payments. The Future of the Service Sector There is no going back to widespread manufacturing employment, either for the US or other rich countries. Nor will we return to dispersed agricultural jobs. The face-to-face service economy must continue providing employment possibilities for people without a computer science degree. Any job that relies on face-to-face interactions with strangers, like the personal trainers of today and unlike the domestic servants of 1918, is vulnerable to pandemic.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

GDP 4.2 Index of world equity prices, Great Depression and current crisis 4.3 Index volume of world trade, Great Depression and current crisis 4.4 Google Trends search term: “toxic assets” 4.5 Fed projection misses the mark 4.6 American bank mergers, 1995–2009 4.7 The “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010 5.1 Proportions of U.S. mortgages originated by various financial entities, 1953–2007 6.1 European ETS prices, 2011 6.2 European public and private debt, 2000 and 2010 6.3 U.S. public and private debt, 1920–2011 6.4 Total Over-the-Counter Outstanding Derivatives 6.5 Google Trends for search term “financial innovation” 1 One More Red Nightmare: The Crisis That Didn’t Change Much of Anything Conjure, if you will, a primal sequence encountered in B-grade horror films, where the celluloid protagonist suffers a terrifying encounter with doom, yet on the cusp of disaster abruptly wakes to a different world, which initially seems normal, but eventually is revealed to be a second nightmare more ghastly than the first.1 Something like that has become manifest in real life since the onset of the crisis which started in 2007. From the crash onward, it was bad enough to endure house prices sinking under water, dangling defaults and foreclosures, the collapse of what remained of manufacturing employment, the reduction of whole neighborhoods to bombed-out shells, the evaporation of pensions and savings accounts, the dismay of witnessing the hope of a better life for our children shrivel up, neighbors stocking up on firearms and people confusing bankruptcy with the Rapture. It was an unnerving interlude, with Nietzschean Eternal Return reduced to an Excel graph with statistics from the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Big Debt Crises
by Ray Dalio
Published 9 Sep 2018

That prompted Paulson to get President Bush’s support in the fall of 2006 to begin working on legislation with Barney Frank (then the ranking minority member of the House Financial Services Committee) to reform those entities, though that push didn’t lead to progress until the crisis came to a head in the summer of 2008.5 The Emerging Broader-Based Bubble The broader economy also showed signs of a bubble. Savings rates declined from low to lower and the US aggressively sucked in capital from abroad. US manufacturing employment fell and the US was rapidly losing global export market share to emerging countries, especially China. However, the increase in housing-related activity camouflaged this; for instance, construction employment in support of building houses increasingly financed by debt rose by around 50 percent compared to 1995.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

For if wages fall, interest must also fall in proportion, else it becomes more profitable to turn labor into capital than to apply it directly; while, if interest falls, wages must likewise proportionately fall, or else the increment of capital would be checked.’ This is a keen insight. (Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York, 1923), p. 199.) fn5 In the five years after China joined the Word Trade Organization in 2001, manufacturing employment in Britain and the United States declined by a third. Displaced workers appear to have found less-well-paid, lower productivity jobs elsewhere. See Stewart Paterson, China, Trade and Power: Why the West’s Economic Engagement Has Failed (London, 2018). fn6 By 2018, the US had a negative net international investment position of $10 trillion, a fivefold increase since before the financial crisis. 18: Financial Repression with Chinese Characteristics fn1 Lien-sheng Yang, Money and Credit in China: A Short History (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 97.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

Then, in the final part of the long twentieth century, from 1990 to 2010, the relative wage of the country from which the average nonoil import came to the United States fell sharply. This was driven largely by China, which was contributing an ever-larger share of manufactured imports even as its wages remained extremely low. Yet the pace of decline in US manufacturing employment did not accelerate. And the share of jobs that were regarded as suitable for blue-collar men—in manufacturing, construction, distribution, and transportation—held steady. American consumers bought Chinese manufactures, and an assembly-line job that had been in Dayton, Ohio, moved to Shenzhen.

Migrant City: A New History of London
by Panikos Panayi
Published 4 Feb 2020

In this situation clothing production could continue despite the international competition from imported goods which decimated much of London’s manufacturing industry.127 Bangladeshi men also worked in this trade so that by the 1970s they provided the largest percentage of males in the clothing industry and also accounted for 20 per cent of jobs in Tower Hamlets where Bangladeshis were concentrated.128 While women have unquestionably faced exploitation in the London rag trade, they often chose to work at home rather than in a factory environment for a variety of reasons: these included, for Bangladeshis, the Islamic need to separate men from women; the lack of command of the English language; and, perhaps most importantly, working at home allowed women to earn a living as well as carrying out their domestic responsibilities of child rearing, cooking and cleaning.129 While a significant percentage of Bangladeshi women chose to work at home in the rag trade, this offers just one example of South Asian manufacturing employment in London. Some Sikhs also laboured in the East End clothing industry but others, centred on Southall, worked in light manufacturing industries in both the food and other sectors, as well as finding a wide range of jobs at Heathrow Airport.130 One South Asian woman, Raksha, born in India in 1951, started working in Heathrow in 1969 on ‘tray-set, you know the meals on flights.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

According to Schlesinger, the plan went through the board “like shooting fish.” Some opposition voices made themselves heard during the hearings. Labor representatives, as noted above, were upset over the lack of industrial reuse in the area and the loss of blue-collar jobs. Official data would later show that between 1960 and 1970 manufacturing employment in San Francisco decreased by 19 percent.6 Herman promised at least 25 percent of the land in the YBC area would be devoted to industry.7 Social workers, ministers, and representatives of the City’s Human Rights Commission appeared, carrying petitions with several hundred names, to register protest over the lack of relocation housing.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Published 24 Oct 2016

Palfrey were increasingly likely to think—from their new vantage point where they stood on those people’s backs—that their business endeavors did not need slavery. As early as the 1830s, Americans in the non-slave states were using cotton-generated wealth to develop a more diversified industrial sector that owed less to trade with the South. For instance, in 1832, the Collins Axe Works, one of the first large-scale manufacturing employers in Connecticut, accounted for almost a quarter of all non-textile manufacturing investment and employment in the state. But by 1845, when Robert Walker, Polk’s secretary of the treasury, commissioned another survey of manufacturing, Connecticut contained about twenty-five different axe manufacturers.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

As we have seen, this agrarian equilibrium was dramatically upset with the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Continuous high levels of economic growth driven by technologically induced increases in productivity reordered societies in dramatic ways. Peasants who had been politically inert over the preceding centuries moved to cities or other centers of manufacturing employment, where they were transformed into an industrial working class. Residents of cities acquired higher levels of education and emerged as a new middle class. As Adam Smith explained, improved transportation and communications technology centered around waterways began to expand the size of markets dramatically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

Vast numbers of Chinese workers left agriculture-related pursuits for manufacturing and service jobs in urban areas. Privately controlled businesses rose to claim a significant share of China's near 800-million-person workforce. By 2006, agriculture was down to little more than two-fifths of total employment. Chinese manufacturing employment has held steady in recent years despite massive workforce reductions in state-owned enterprises. The largest gains in employment over the last decade have been in services. Importantly, it is the pace, the rate of change, of movement from centrally planned employment to competitive markets that determines the degree of disinflationary pressure on developed nations' wage costs and hence prices.

The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published 15 Jul 2009

This was partly because the Northern Ireland issue remained marginal in British politics, even if it was true there was still strong integrationist feeling within the Conservative party.65 But there was little prospect of Britain being allowed to forget the North, politically or economically. By 1986 the IRA had killed 80 people in Britain; by 1994 one third of the North’s GDP came from Westminster’s financial subvention, and four out of every ten workers were employed directly by the British state. There had been a significant fall in manufacturing employment, from 183,600 in 1960 to 101,300 in 1985. By 1996 only 2,000 were employed in the shipyards and the Troubles undoubtedly affected investment; the De Lorean car plant fiasco in 1982 cost the British taxpayers £85 million. By 1990, foreign-owned plants employed more than twice as many people in the South than in the North.