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President Joe Biden has frequently spoken of a massive increase in manufacturing jobs.
It’s a message designed to work well in the industrial Midwest, where states like Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are hosting senator and gubernatorial campaigns in the midterm elections. , aims to paint a better record than that of the president’s predecessor, Donald Trump.
In a speech at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Oct. 24, Biden said, “Under Trump’s watch, American manufacturing has hollowed out. Under my watch, ‘Made in America’ is just It’s not a slogan, it’s reality.”
Three days later, Biden traveled to Syracuse, New York, to spotlight Micron’s plans to invest in microchip manufacturing. “This country lost over 180,000 manufacturing jobs under the last man who had this job,” Biden said at an event there. and added manufacturing jobs at a faster rate than in 40 years.”
Biden is numerically correct in job statistics. But experts say he should pay more attention to his victory lap.The comparison between Trump and Biden is darker than the president allows is.
How Biden’s policies boosted manufacturing jobs
We asked the White House for evidence to support the notion that Biden has been exceptionally successful at creating manufacturing jobs. The official pointed to data showing that it took 30 months, from April 2020 to September 2022, for manufacturing employment to return to its pre-pandemic recession peak. It may sound like a long time, but after the recessions of 1990, 2001 and 2007, manufacturing employment didn’t even return to its previous levels after 100 months. .
The White House also pointed to two bipartisan bills Biden signed into law during his first two years in office, one to tackle infrastructure and another aimed at boosting chip manufacturing and scientific research. It also touted the Democrats-only passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives for purchasing clean energy technologies.
President Joe Biden speaks with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger at the groundbreaking ceremony for Intel’s new semiconductor manufacturing facility in New Albany, Ohio, on September 9, 2022. (AP)
Scott Paul, chairman of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, has praised Mr. Biden for creating manufacturing jobs.
Biden has created “a climate for factory investment not seen in generations,” including investments in infrastructure, clean energy manufacturing and semiconductors, Paul told Politifact. You can see it in factory announcements almost every week.”
Gary Bartress, an economist at the Brookings Institution, agreed that manufacturing jobs, about 700,000, have risen unusually quickly from pandemic-era lows. He said some of the things he could control were made possible by the Federal Pandemic Assistance Program for businesses, the unemployed, and stimulus-checked Americans in particular. was held steady rather than declining to
But the pandemic relief bill began under Trump, as did the rise in manufacturing jobs.
“The recovery trend is evident in both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Bartress said. “We can question whether the trend is a little stronger in the Biden administration, but certainly the recovery in US manufacturing was already evident in the Trump administration.
Other factors fueled a manufacturing job recovery that was clearly beyond Biden’s control. These include the disruption to international trade caused by the pandemic.
“U.S. manufacturers face less international competition than they would have faced without the pandemic, which may have been a reason to hire more,” Bartress said.
Ultimately, the Biden administration’s policies and winning rhetoric on manufacturing are hardly new, said Douglas Holz-Eakin, chairman of the center-right American Action Forum. “Many presidents have said similar things about his predecessor,” he said. “We have seen all of these (policy) levers pulled before.”
Manufacturing employment is well below historic highs
One area Biden’s message doesn’t address is that employment is well below historical highs due to the recent increase in manufacturing jobs.
Since peaking in 1979, manufacturing employment has fallen by just over a third, while the total number of available workers across all US sectors has increased by 57% over the same period.
Automation and globalization are the biggest drivers of shrinking U.S. manufacturing jobs, experts say.
“Manufacturing has become incredibly automated,” says Duke University economist Alan Collard-Wexler. The only manufacturing sector we have built is the meat processing plant, an industry where irregular patterns in animal biology make automation difficult.”
Automation has led to significant efficiency gains that have doubled over the decades. Since 1979, manufacturing employment has fallen by a third, while manufacturing industrial production has more than doubled for him.
When it comes to globalization, “companies are offshoring some of their production,” says Teresa Fort, an associate professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “Foreign companies in low-wage countries can produce some goods more cheaply,” she said.
Can the US bring manufacturing employment back to previous levels?
One of the reasons manufacturing jobs are so attractive to politicians is that they historically have higher wages than many other types of jobs, especially for people with moderately educated backgrounds.
Experts said Biden’s policies, including aid to chip manufacturing, could have a positive impact. Fort said moves to reduce or eliminate tariffs on raw materials that drive up costs for U.S. manufacturers could also help.
Still, even if Biden’s policies continue to benefit manufacturing jobs for years to come, experts aren’t bullish about a return to U.S. manufacturing to its glory days.
“There has been a recurring mantra of promoting US manufacturing, but the reality is that, going back to the 1950s or 1960s, the US was essentially a global powerhouse that spanned a World War II-ravaged world. It was a giant in manufacturing,” said Holtz-Eakin. Not today.
Fort said the scale of the U.S. manufacturing resurgence will depend on how well U.S. companies can compete with other countries’ manufacturing sectors.
On the other hand, not everyone is convinced that Biden and his predecessors are worth focusing on manufacturing.
“What’s so special about manufacturing?” said Holz Eakin. “We are good at inventing things. When we have high value-added items, we throw away low value-added items.”
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