Is U.S. Manufacturing Staying Strong?

Is U.S. Manufacturing Staying Strong?

America’s view of its economic and manufacturing future is that of a crumbling empire. And that just isn’t so, said Daniel Griswold, director of trade-policy studies at the Cato Institute, in a recent article in Industry Week.

Griswold points to two primary misconceptions: the notion of equating a country’s manufacturing weight by the number of its manufacturing workers; and that global trade has crippled U.S. industry.

He points out that manufacturing has been one of its bright spots, in an otherwise slow economic recovery. According to Griswold, output has grown exponentially from recent decades, but because of technological advances, it has required fewer workers to achieve heightened production.

“Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at 21 million,” said Griswold. “It’s been trending down since then. We’re locked into the same trend that every advanced nation has seen, which is that manufacturing employment and output peaks as a share of output, then it starts to decline as the service sector becomes more important.”

“The future of U.S. manufacturing is not in the kind of jobs we’ve lost, which were manual work and assembly line,” said Griswold. “It’s in the design and engineering and management of the supply chain.”

Griswold told Industry Week, “There are certain workers that are just never going to get their old job back at the wages and benefits they had enjoyed. A lot of those positions were unionized and artificially high.” ◆