The anger that many working-class Americans feel about the decline of American manufacturing has manifested itself in the 2016 presidential...
The anger that many working-class Americans feel about the decline of American manufacturing has manifested itself in the 2016 presidential election. On the Republican side, Trump has promised to do whatever is necessary in order to protect American manufacturing jobs - including implementing policies like high tariffs and conducting business interventions. On the Democratic side, Senator Sanders blamed past trade agreements for the decline in manufacturing jobs. This anger is, perhaps, warranted: according to a report from the Federal Reserve, American manufacturing employment decreased by 18 percent between March 2001 and March 2007 and can be tied to the U.S. granting Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China.
However, some argue that �reshoring� (bringing manufacturing jobs in foreign countries back to America) cannot and will not restore the American manufacturing industry as it once was. The argument is that reshoring is already happening, but many blue-collar workers are not seeing the results. More and more companies are bringing their manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. (60 percent from China), company executives are increasingly planning on reshoring production, factory jobs have been on the rise since March 2010, the wages for those jobs have been increasing, and for the past few years, for every offshored job, another job has been reshored. And yet, American manufacturing is still not what it was. The U.S. has approximately 7 million less manufacturing jobs today than it did during its peak in 1979.
One possible reason for these statistics is that while manufacturing is coming back to America, the factories being built are heavily automated, and thus need much less workers than they might have needed previously. A better solution for helping the middle-class might then be to raise wages for people in service jobs, like retail workers. More Americans work in retail than manufacturing, and on average, retail workers also make less than factory workers.
Another possible reason for this is that modern factories, due to more advanced technologies, require workers who are adept at handling those advanced technologies. Current factory workers do not have the training for this, and thus, another possible solution is to invest in training programs. This in turn might encourage more companies to reshore, as there would be more highly-trained workers in the labor market.
Further Reading:
FiveThirtyEight, Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back
The New Yorker, Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About Manufacturing Jobs and China
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