Trump’s jobs homecoming a long shot even in manufacturing hot spots
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA: When US manufacturing employment peaked, Jimmy Carter was president, inflation was 11 per cent, and craftsmen at Frontier Contact Lenses made the company’s products one at a time on diamond-tipped lathes.
As presidential candidates promise to reclaim jobs lost in the intervening decades, they might want to visit the company now.
Bought by Johnson & Johnson in 1981, the fully automated factory allows four workers to produce in a 12-hour shift what more labor- intensive methods produced in a year.
The Jacksonville plant and one in Ireland make 4 billion soft contacts a year, and between the robots and lasers and computer algorithms no worker touches the product from the start of the process through final packaging.
“I don’t think you could even make 4 billion lenses” using the old method, said David Turner, vice president of research and development for Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, Inc. “You’d need a guy with a lathe in every town.”
Since peaking at 19.5 million in 1979, the number of US manufacturing jobs has fallen 37 per cent to around 12.2 million as of March, or just over 10 per cent of the private sector workforce.
That may be as good as it gets. Despite the promises made on the campaign trail by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and other candidates, the next president will find it hard to raise manufacturing’s share of a US labour force that keeps shifting towards services.
While much of the jobs debate has centred on trade pacts that Democrats and Republicans have backed over the last quarter century, both successful and struggling companies and sectors offer evidence of long- term trends that neither sharp trade negotiators nor aggressive political leaders can easily reverse.
Even critics of trade deals acknowledge that labour intensive industries, such as textiles, which once employed hundreds of thousands of lessskilled workers, are probably gone for good.
Technology continues to diminish the share of labour in production and its spread around the world has made other nations – notably China, but also Korea, Brazil, Mexico and former Soviet bloc countries – competitive both as exporters and in their own markets.
I nvestment wo rldwide is drifting steadily towards services, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and Americans are spending relatively less of their income on manufactured goods.
A Reuters analysis of federal data for 1,267 categories of goods shows that the United States has been running a trade deficit in more than 500 of them since at least 1992 – before the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force or China joined the World Trade Organization, events often cited as turning points for US manufacturing.
Since the 2007-2009 recession manufacturing has added about 800,000 jobs, but that has lagged overall job growth. — Reuters