Despite the extraordinarily slow recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression, for the first time in over a decade, manufacturing employment actually increased last year.

According to government data, U.S. manufacturing employment grew 1.2 percent last year, accounting for 136,000 jobs.

That marked the first increase in manufacturing employment in the country since 1997, just three years after the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented, further accelerating the nation’s industrial decline.

Not only was last year a fairly good one for the manufacturing sector, but economists expect the trend to continue.

“Manufacturing is going to be a significant source of job growth over the next decade,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told The Wall Street Journal.
Next year, economists predict that employment in the manufacturing sector will grow by about 2.5 percent. That would add some 330,000 good jobs to the economy.

But even with a decade of annual job growth in the hundreds of thousands, it will do little to restore the nation’s decimated industrial base.

Since 1997, the manufacturing sector has shed roughly six million jobs, due to the nation’s failed trade policies.

Today, manufacturing accounts for just nine percent of all non-farm jobs. In the sector, the typical pay is about $22 per hour, roughly twice the average pay rate of jobs in the service sector.

So not only has America lost millions of jobs due to its failed trade policies, it has also lost millions and millions in wealth as a result. The hollowing of America’s manufacturing base has also been extremely costly in other ways as well.

According to the Alliance for American Manufacturing, the sector generates $1.6 trillion annually, or 12 percent of gross domestic product, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s research and development investment, two-thirds of the nation’s total export of goods and services and employs over 20 million Americans. America’s industrial base is also instrumental in supporting the nation’s national security apparatus.

Once the engine that drove the nation’s powerful economy, America’s manufacturing base has been drastically reduced through failed trade policies. In 1980, around the time that globalization exploded and free trade agreements became more prevalent, the U.S. had 19.2 million manufacturing jobs. Since then, the sector’s total employment has fallen to just 11.6 million as jobs are outsourced to low-wage nations, like Mexico and China.

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