The basic patterns of US manufacturing jobs are fairly well-known. Here’s a figure showing total US manufacturing jobs over the last half-century or so: more-or-less flat from the 1970s up through 2000, then a decline from 2000 to about 2010, and more-or-less flat since then. Part of what happened in the early 2000s was a surge of imports from China, after China became a member of the World Trade Organization. Another part was that US workers who might otherwise have been in manufacturing jobs shifted to house-building during that boom-and-bust of US housing in the lead-up to the Great Recession. Part of the reason was US manufacturing firms making much more widespread use of robotics.
Putting manufacturing jobs in the context of total jobs in the US economy gives something of a different impression. This figure shows that even when total manufacturing jobs seemed to be more-or-less holding their own from 1970 up to about 2000, other jobs in the US economy were actually growing. The result is that manufacturing jobs were about 26% of the US total in 1970, but the percentage had fallen by half to 13% of all US jobs by 2000. From this perspective, the decline of the role of manufacturing jobs in US employment is a long run process–a little faster in the decade after 2000 than in the decades before, but not much 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 has fallen substantially, and the share with a college degree has risen substantially.
2) College-educated manufacturing workers have a modest wage premium; non-college manufacturing workers do not. A “wage premium” is “defined as the average wage difference between workers in a given industry and those with 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 up through about 2000 was that the number of manufacturing workers wasn’t going up, but the productivity of US manufacturing workers was rising substantially. That story no longer seems to be true. In the 1990s and even into the 2000s, productivity in manufacturing rose faster than 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 an outflow of existing manufacturing workers, but by a lack of inflow of younger workers into the sector. A result is that current US manufacturers are concerned that they would like to increase production, but lack the workers to do so. (Of course, the economist in me suggests that increasing the wage premiums would help them in attracting more workers.) Dicandia writes:
Alongside this persistent decline in employment share in the sector, manufacturers themselves report significant workforce challenges. The 2025:Q3 Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization (US Census Bureau) reports that more than one-fifth of all manufacturers indicate that they were not able to work at full production capacity because of an insufficient supply of labor, while the National Association of Manufacturers survey in 2025:Q4 reports that more than half of manufacturers identify attracting and retaining qualified employees as a relevant challenge for their business.
Worker flows into and out of manufacturing have evolved over time but do not differ markedly from patterns observed in other sectors of the economy (results not shown, author’s analysis of US Census Bureau LED data). This suggests that worker mobility involving manufacturing largely reflects economy-wide labor market dynamics rather than sector-specific turnover. Instead, the key driver of manufacturing’s employment decline has been the lack of younger workers entering the industry (results not shown, author’s analysis of CPS data). Specifically, between 1960 and 2009, each successive cohort of workers has entered manufacturing at progressively lower rates.
