The basic pattern of US manufacturing jobs is fairly well known. Here are the numbers showing total US manufacturing jobs over the past half century: more or less flat from the 1970s to 2000, then down from 2000 to 2010, and more or less flat since then. Part of what happened in the early 2000s was an increase in imports from China, after China became a member of the World Trade Organization. Another part is that US workers who may have worked in manufacturing moved into housing during the US housing boom-and-bust during the Great Recession. One reason is that US manufacturing companies are using robotics more.
Placing manufacturing jobs in the context of total jobs in the US economy gives a different impression. This figure shows that although total manufacturing jobs were more or less the same from 1970 to 2000, other jobs in the US economy were growing. The result is that manufacturing jobs accounted for about 26% of the US total in 1970, but the percentage has dropped by half to 13% of all US jobs in 2000. From this perspective, the decline in the role of manufacturing jobs in US employment is a long process – faster in the decade after 2000 than in the previous decade, but not faster.
Vittoria Dicandia provides a closer look at some long-term patterns in US manufacturing jobs in “Manufacturing in the United States” (Economic Commentary: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, September 21, 2026).
1) The share of US manufacturing workers with no college degrees has fallen dramatically, and the share with college degrees has risen dramatically.
2) College-educated manufacturing workers have a low wage premium; non-college manufacturing workers do not. A “wage premium” has been “defined as the average wage difference between workers in a given industry and similar observable characteristics, such as age, education, and occupation, in the rest of the economy.” Dicandia calculates:
3) The traditional story about US manufacturing jobs from 1970 to about 2000 is that the number of manufacturing workers did not increase, but the productivity of US manufacturing workers increased. The story seems to be untrue. In the 1990s and even in the 2000s, productivity in manufacturing grew faster than in the rest of the economy; since 2007, productivity growth in Manufacturing has actually been slightly negative.
4) Over time, the US workforce has adapted to a smaller share of manufacturing jobs not so much by the exit of existing manufacturing workers, but by the lack of inflow of young workers into the sector. As a result, US manufacturers are now worried that they want to increase production, but do not have the labor force. (Of course, the economist in me suggests that increasing the wage premium will help them attract more workers.) Dicandia writes:
In addition to the declining share of employment in the sector, manufacturers themselves report significant employment challenges. The 2025:Q3 Quarterly Survey of Factory Capacity Utilization (US Census Bureau) reports that more than one-fifth of all manufacturers indicate that they are unable to operate at full production capacity due to insufficient labor, while the National Association of Manufacturers survey in 2025:Q4 reports that more than half of manufacturers identify challenges to matching and retaining business.
The flow of employees to and from manufacturing has evolved over time but does not differ from the pattern observed in other economic sectors (results not shown, the author’s analysis of the US Census Bureau LED data). This suggests that worker mobility involved in manufacturing generally reflects economy-wide labor market dynamics rather than sector-specific turnover. However, the main driver of the decline in manufacturing employment is the lack of younger workers entering the industry (results not shown, CPS data analysis). Specifically, between 1960 and 2009, each successive worker group has entered manufacturing at lower rates.
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