Manufacturing Job LossTrade, Not Productivity, Is the Culprit

[kentuck]

I cannot believe that this is not at play in Britain, also, and was not a factor in the recent Brexit vote?
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http://www.epi.org/publication/manufacturing-job-loss-trade-not-productivity-is-the-culprit/

<snip>
The United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between January 2000 and December 2014. There is a widespread misperception that rapid productivity growth is the primary cause of continuing manufacturing job losses over the past 15 years. Instead, as this report shows, job losses can be traced to growing trade deficits in manufacturing products prior to the Great Recession and then the massive output collapse during the Great Recession.

Specifically, between 2000 and 2007, growing trade deficits in manufactured goods led to the loss of 3.6 million manufacturing jobs in that period. Between 2007 and 2009, the massive collapse in overall U.S. output hit manufacturing particularly hard (real manufacturing output fell 10.3 percent between 2007 and 2009). This collapse was followed by the slowest recovery in domestic manufacturing output in more than 60 years. Reasonably strong GDP growth over the past five years has not been sufficient to counter these trends; only about 900,000 of the 2.3 million manufacturing jobs lost during the Great Recession have been recovered. In addition, resurgence of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods since 2009 has hurt the recovery of manufacturing output and employment.

In short, the collapse in demand during the Great Recession and ensuing glacial recovery was responsible for most or all of the 1.4 million net manufacturing jobs lost between 2007 and 2014. Between 2007 and 2014, productivity growth slowed noticeably, and manufacturing output experienced no net, real growth.

[msongs]

1. Aermicans want cheap stuff from China even if it means elimination of their own jobs. mission

accomplished

[tonyt53]

2. Sums it up very well. The high dollar value hurts us exports too.

[orwell]

3. Manufacturing jobs are being "lost"...

...due mainly to technology and secondarily to cheaper foreign labor.

This is a trendline set in stone primarily due to technological improvement/labor replacement on the factory floor.

This is not going to go away no matter what the relative labor costs are.

We simply will not need as many of these jobs in the future.

[CrowCityDem]

4. Manufacturing jobs have been declining for decades. There isn't one single cause.

[pampango]

5. We trade less than any country this side of North Korea. Progressive countries all trade much, much

more than we do. If trade caused our problems the problems in Canada, Sweden and Germany would be many times worse than they are here. They are not.

Every country in the world has seen a decline in manufacturing employment - including Germany, Sweden and Canada. The middle classes in those progressive countries are much better off than ours despite this fact. Why is that? Because they have progressive policies on taxation, safety net, labor unions, etc.

Why do you think Germany, Canada and Sweden have manufacturing trade surpluses when they pay higher wages than US manufacturers and have stronger labor unions? Are we so "exceptional" (exceptionally bad?) that we can't do what they have done if we adopt their progressive policies?

[kentuck]

6. Does that include Vietnam, China, and Indonesia also?

Do we have the manufacturing numbers of those countries?

[pampango]

7. No but I do not begrudge poor people getting ahead if that is the point of your question.

Per capita income in the US is about $57,000. It's about $42,000 in Germany; $41,000 in Sweden; $41,000 in the UK.

Our country has plenty of financial resources that can be use to provide a secure, middle class life to our people just as other more progressive countries do with less in the way of financial resources. I don't hear liberals in Sweden, Canada and Germany lamenting the possibility that poor people in other countries might benefit from trade.

Asking Vietnamese and Indonesians to 'bootstrap' themselves out of poverty and "Leave us the hell along" does not seem like a liberal policy to me. Our 1% are raking in a huge share of the $57,000 per capita income. Instead of us going after Vietnamese and Indonesians, why don't we go after our own 1% like FDR did.

Harry Hopkins (FDR adviser and an architect of the New Deal) interrupted FDR while he was dictating the Four Freedoms speech and told FDR that he should not say "everywhere in the world because Americans are not going to give a damn about people in Java".

FDR replied, "Well Harry. They are going to have to give a damn about people in Java from now on."

The speech delivered by President Roosevelt incorporated the following text, known as the "Four Freedoms":

"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."—Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms

It's actually in Indonesia.