"Over the last six months, we’ve witnessed one manufacturing miracle after another," the president said on a visit last month to a Whirlpool factory. Ohio was down 48,000 manufacturing workers in July from last year. Pre-pandemic, it had lost 2,200 workers in February from last year.
The trend is mirrored nationwide. Manufacturing across the U.S. is still down 720,000 workers from February despite gaining 29,000 jobs in August, with the pandemic more than wiping out the overall modest gains of 500,000 from Trump's first three years in office — about the same pace of growth as under President Barack Obama. It was not an improvement over prior years — nor did it manage to restore more than a fraction of the jobs lost in the previous decade, according to an August analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
A Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis released Sept. 1 said that even prepandemic, the sector was on track to lose nearly 450,000 workers by 2029, the most of any area of the economy. At the same time, output has made a notable recovery due to increased automation, with the industrial production index bouncing back to almost 98 in July — less than 10 points down from February.
That disparity means that many of the losses are likely permanent, economists say.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/16/trump-manufacturing-jobs-record-415588
