That struggle won the election for Trump. Suzanne Berger, an US political scientist at MIT, and author of ‘Making in America’ agrees that Trump harnessed that drama for votes. He was the first US politician to understand that drama, to speak directly to the anxieties of what the American working class had gone through,” he adds. And Donald Trump’s politics came right out of that. If anything, African Americans and Hispanics got hit worse. “This affected not just the white working class. “In other words, one of the main routes into the American middle class just got cut off. “Most of the jobs that were lost were in the lower end of production, as opposed to higher skilled jobs,” says Bonvillian. This is a shocking state of affairs, considering how many advanced technologies originate in the US.īeyond such eye-watering figures, the US’s manufacturing shifts precipitated social change that altered US and global politics. In 2015, the US ran a trade deficit of $832bn in manufactured goods, while in 2017 the total included a $110bn deficit in advanced technology products – a figure that has grown since 2002. These negative trends are confirmed by trade figures. Similarly, US productivity growth in manufacturing also hit a nadir that decade, and remains at historically low levels. Only in very recent years has manufacturing output returned to pre-recession levels. Meanwhile, US manufacturing output grew only 0.5% per year between 20, and during the global financial crisis of 2007–09 fell by a huge 10.3%. The fixed capital investment of manufacturing (plant, equipment, information technology, and so on) actually declined in the 2000s – for the first time since data collection began in 1947.
Between 20, nearly six million jobs in US manufacturing were lost, with the sectors most prone to globalisation displacement, such as textiles and furniture, taking the biggest hit, according to research by Bonvillian and MIT’s Peter L Singer. Unfortunately, Moraine’s story was all too common. Set in the rust belt state of Ohio, it highlights the devastation wrought to Moraine by the closure of the General Motors plant in 2008, the town’s economic lifeline. The award-winning Netflix documentary ‘American Factory’ perfectly captures the aforementioned drama, that decade of manufacturing misery in the US. (Photo by Mira Oberman/AFP/GettyImages) The fall of US manufacturing in numbers The General Motors automotive assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, stands empty, a sign of how manufacturing has deserted blue-collar states in the US.
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