Jake Starkey
Verified User
Trump promised to save manufacturing jobs. The numbers show he's failing.
The September labor market report was late, thanks to the government shutdown. And when it finally arrived on Thursday, it was also confusing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added 119,000 jobs in September, well above expectations. But the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, its highest since October 2021.
Of course, these monthly reports are noisy, and it’s not unusual for their indicators to point in different directions. That’s why you want to look at the trends, and one important sector, both economically and politically, has consistently trended down over the last few years. We’re talking about manufacturing, which shed another 6,000 jobs in September — the fifth month in a row of factory job losses.
But the decline is not surprising. Manufacturing jobs are down 194,000 (1.5%) from their most recent peak, in February 2023. That means this trend predates Trump’s second term, so his tariffs aren’t the whole problem. But the import taxes are unquestionably part of the problem. In fact, the last time that factory employment was this soft outside a recession was right after Trump implemented tariffs during his first term. After robust growth in 2017-18, between January 2019 and February 2020 American factories shed 47,000 jobs.
One reason for these losses is that half of our imports are not the “final goods” lining the shelves at Walmart and Target. Rather, they’re “intermediate goods,” or inputs into our own domestic production. It’s a simple, remarkable fact that neither the president nor anyone around him has ever addressed: When you make it more expensive for factories to produce their output, you’re going to hurt their workers. A Federal Reserve paper analyzing Trump’s first-term tariffs found that any positive impact of tariffs protecting industries from imports was more than offset by tariffs raising the prices of intermediate imports and by the retaliatory tariffs other countries levied on U.S. exports.
For more contemporaneous evidence, look no further than the monthly survey of U.S. manufacturers run by the Institute for Supply Management (ISM). For 31 of the past 34 months, survey respondents report contracting employment at their firms. But the most illuminating parts of these surveys are the respondents’ comments on how things are going for them. Here are a few of these reflections from the October report, with the first from a chemical products manufacturing firm:
From a machine producer:
And from a farm machinery producer:
What about the longer-term negative trend, the one that started in early 2023? Here, we turn to our previous work on the long history of U.S. manufacturing employment. Examining manufacturing data from 1949 to 2025, we found that declines in U.S. manufacturing employment occurred in periods when manufacturers increased their production efficiency — periods of high productivity growth — and demand for domestically manufactured goods was low. The “China shock” period of 2000-10 is Exhibit A of this dynamic: Technological advances made manufacturers more productive, while a flood of cheap goods from China replaced domestically manufactured goods in U.S. consumption, a combination that wiped out 5 million factory jobs.
www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-promised-to-save-manufacturing-jobs-the-numbers-show-he-s-failing/ar-AA1QUyti?ocid=msedgntp&pc=BINBAN&cvid=69213d7ff0d64139a53bf6de2bb67cb9&ei=59
