The Long Decline of American Manufacturing

Two metrics and two stories

The American manufacturing workforce has been in decline for a long time. But, depending on how you look at it, it’s hard to say for how long:

One story goes that manufacturing peaked in the 1970s, with the peak of workforce by headcount. However, manufacturing employees as a percentage of total employees has been falling steadily since WWII.

Either way you look at it, manufacturing employment as a portion of our economic engine has declined but there is a large gap of about three decades for where you could argue it really began. That big difference in timing changes the narrative drastically.

The decline could be a boring result of long-term post-war economic transformation or a more hot-button result of something like manufacturing offshoring and globalization. It depends on what story you want to tell and what conclusion you want to bring readers to.

People like neat, simple stories that can logically lead them to form an opinion on whether something is good or bad. This is just one easy example on why the stories are never complete and reality is always significantly messier.

And, to make the story more complicated, since the end of the Financial Crisis, another phenomenon has emerged - the stabilization of manufacturing employment. The seven decade trend of decline has stopped.

Will it go up from here? Down again? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Instead of offering a neat (but likely unrealistic and overly simplified) opinion, I’ll stick with the annoying answer of, “well, it’s complicated…”

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