Politicians and President Donald Trump sell the vision of a manufacturing renaissance, but the Washington Post Editorial Board argues their vision of “massive factories employing thousands of people” are not possible in real-life America.
“Some places have had manufacturing renaissances,” reports the Post, citing its coverage of Bridgeport, Connecticut, with an old manufacturing city allegedly sputtering “back to life,” according to the headline.
Once the home of Remington and divisions of General Electric, which filed for bankruptcy in 1991, the area is now serving vocational education programs that are helping workers without college degrees cultivate welding and technician skills, which almost guarantee careers.
It was a “feel-good story politicians want to hear,” writes the Post, though the paper observed that the hard truth of re-emerging factory jobs “barely registered” in the overall data on Bridgeport’s economy. Manufacturing employment in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury metropolitan statistical area saw only “a small bump” and remains near 30-year lows, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“Real manufacturing output in the Bridgeport metro area has been rising but is also quite low compared to before the Great Recession, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis,” the Post reports. “The turnaround in the past few years is that manufacturing is no longer a drag on Bridgeport’s GDP growth, as it was during most years since the Great Recession. It flipped positive in 2021” — But is has remained “barely above zero” since then.
The problem, according the Post, is that the new jobs “are relatively few in number,” however high in compensation.
“These newer, successful manufacturing companies in Bridgeport don’t have assembly lines with workers performing repetitive tasks. They have high-skilled workers meeting exacting specifications for a relatively small number of picky customers,” said the Post. “That’s what most American manufacturing firms look like today. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. manufacturing firms employ fewer than 500 people, and 93 percent employ fewer than 100, according to 2022 data.”
The “manufacturing” jobs actually employ more robots than anything, per the Post's editorial. Automation makes them extremely productive, and more productive workers are paid more, but it still means fewer people work in manufacturing than in the past.
“Pro-manufacturing politicians face a choice,” says the Post. “They can applaud the success of places like Bridgeport while conceding that manufacturing isn’t a jobs juggernaut. Or they can continue to yearn for the mass-production plants of yesteryear, which aren’t coming back. Even if they did, they would yield worse, lower-paying jobs than the high-tech manufacturing plants of today.”
Read the Post's editorial at this link.