I have been grinching for years about how corporate America has shipped its manufacturing jobs to China and its IT jobs to India for years. Wall Sreet's instatiable appetite for higher earnings has lead to the slow destruction of the backbone of America.
It is pretty much a given that the US auto industry is going to lose most if not all of the 1 million jobs working directly for legacy auto makers as they are replaced by EV's.
What is far more important in my mind is what happens to the 8 million jobs associated with the legacy auto makers who actually make the stuff that goes into cars. The legacy auto makers don't actually make anything other than engines as they simply assemble parts provided by others. Hence the 8 million ancilliary jobs versus the 1 million core jobs in the auto industry.
The legacy auto makers smugly sat around ridiculting Musk for 15 years. Now, if GM and Ford and Stellantis (who took over Chrysler) are to survive the transition to EV's, it will be on the back of the grants and rebates that Biden has created which begin in earnest on January 1st.
As much as it is impossible to like pretty much anything that Biden has done in the past two years, the following jobs report offers a glimmer of hope for manufacturing in the USA. Maybe Biden will be able to rebuild America if he doesn't bury it to death in the process.
Friday’s September jobs report showed US manufacturers added another 22,000 workers in September, increasing employment in the sector by nearly 500,000 over the course of the last 12 months.
The nearly 13 million workers employed in US factories make up the industry’s largest workforce since the Great Recession caused employment in the sector to plunge more than a dozen years ago. Since April, manufacturing employment has been growing at about a 4% annual rate, the fastest sustained pace of growth since 1984, when the sector had more than twice as large a share of US jobs.
And employers say they now are scrambling to fill even more jobs. The sector has had about 800,000 openings for most of the last year, despite the hiring binge, according to the Labor Department’s report. J Powell keeps talking about JOBS. He is intent upon killing the job market as a means to slow inflation.
Maybe Powell should listen the likes of Cathie Wood and others who are imploring the FED to apply the brakes to further interest rate hikes to let America sort things outnaturally rather than crushing families and the country itself.