Manufacturing Job Losses and Causes

 Manufacturing Job Losses and Causes

Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have generally declined over the decades, peaking at about 19.6 million in June 1979 and falling to approximately 12.8 million by June 2019. As of late 2025, there are nearly 13 million manufacturing workers, reflecting a slight recovery but still below historical highs.

There are multiple causes for this declining trend. Automation is a factor but failure to automate would raise costs and prices and therefore put us at a disadvantage to other nations who do automate while reducing our standard of living due to higher costs to purchase the things that we want.

Another major factor is tariffs. For decades, other nations have had much higher tariffs on us than we did on them. Those higher tariffs caused more products to be produced by other nations and less products to be produced here in America as our overseas export sales were reduced by these tariffs which made our products more expensive to purchase by foreign nations. The Trump targeted tariffs against those who have dealt unfairly with us is already starting to result in more fair trade.

Another major factor in the reduction in American manufacturing exports is unfair trading practices, particularly by China. Through slave labor and government subsidies, China has made many of their products cheaper than they would have been. Why would they do that? Doesn't that hurt them? China's goal is to put competitor foreign manufacturers out of business. Once they accomplish that, then they can raise prices while dominating the market. That is the same strategy that our domestic monopolists utilized in the 1800s when monopolies were still legal. They were big enough to absorb losses from selling under cost for a short period of time to put smaller companies of the same product out of business. Then they would raise prices very significantly after those competitors were out of business. That is why Trump putting some extreme tariffs on China to combat their very unfair trading practices. Initially, there would be some pricing pain for us on some products, but long term we will be much better off as China would be forced to abandon their unfair trading practices with America. However, you can bet that they will continue these unfair trading practices with other nations, especially developing nations.