That job, this job, no job........

[JustRalph]

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-07-26/good-jobs-in-minority-despite-ongoing-recovery

[Dave Schwartz]

Excellent article. Thanks for posting that, Ralph.

[Clocker]

From the link:

The labor market held more than a million fewer construction jobs and more than 1.6 million fewer manufacturing positions in June than was the case nine years ago, before the Great Recession hit.

Contrary to popular political belief, the big hit in manufacturing jobs is not due to taking jobs off shore. American manufacturing output is at an all time high. But it is not the old school consumer goods, and it requires a lot fewer workers because of improvements in technology and productivity. Only 15-25% of lost jobs in manufacturing is due to off-shore production. And the same trend is happening off-shore, as manufacturing jobs are decreasing in China, India, and South Korea.

A report from the Boston Consulting Group last week suggested the U.S. had become the second-most-competitive manufacturing location among the 25 largest manufacturing exporters worldwide. While that news is welcome, most of the lost U.S. manufacturing jobs in recent decades aren’t coming back. In 1970, more than a quarter of U.S. employees worked in manufacturing. By 2010, only one in 10 did.

Pretty much every economy around the world has a low or declining share of manufacturing jobs. According to OECD data, the U.K. and Australia have seen their share of manufacturing drop by around two-thirds since 1971. Germany’s share halved, and manufacturing’s contribution to gross domestic product there fell from 30 percent in 1980 to 22 percent today. In South Korea, a late industrializer and exemplar of miracle growth, the manufacturing share of employment rose from 13 percent in 1970 to 28 percent in 1991; it’s fallen to 17 percent today.

The decline in manufacturing jobs isn’t confined to the (now) rich world. According to the Groningen Growth and Development Center, manufacturing jobs in Brazil climbed as a proportion of total employment from 12 percent in 1950 to 16 percent in 1986. Since then it’s slid to around 13 percent. In India, manufacturing accounted for 10 percent of employment in 1960, rising to 13 percent in 2002 before the level began to fall. China’s manufacturing employment share peaked at around 15 percent in the mid-1990s and has generally remained below that level since, estimates Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. As a proportion of output, manufacturing accounted for 40 percent of Chinese GDP in 1980 compared with 32 percent now.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-28/why-factory-jobs-are-shrinking-everywhere (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-28/why-factory-jobs-are-shrinking-everywhere)