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What Happened to American Manufacturing Jobs, and Why Did It Matter?

In 2001, Paul Sufronko, a supervisor at Rocky Shoes and Boots in Nelsonville, Ohio, handed out final paychecks to the company’s last sixty-seven employees in the United States, thereby ending a process of outsourcing that had begun in the 1980s. Before his own job ended, Sufronko traveled to Rocky plants in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to train local workers to replace him. Asked about his job loss, the thirty-six-year-old said, “Things just didn’t work out.” Other Americans did not take the loss of their jobs to foreign workers quite so philosophically. An autoworker in Michigan believed that “corporations are looking for a disposable workforce. . . . No commitment to community; no commitment to country.” Sufronko’s displacement reflected a pattern across industrial America: In 1960, 96 percent of all shoes bought in the United States were made within the country; by 2000, nearly all came from abroad.

Beginning in the 1970s, the process of de-industrialization affected huge segments of the U.S. economy, including steel, appliances, machine tools, computers, furniture, clothing, and more. From a peak of 19.5 million in 1977, the number of manufacturing jobs fell below 12 million by 2012. The proportion of American workers in manufacturing jobs dropped from one-third in the 1950s to 10 percent by the twenty-first century. Although factory work was often grueling and tedious, blue-collar wages provided a middle-class existence for millions of families. Industrial labor unions had boosted wages, even among those whose workplaces were not organized, and provided other benefits such as health insurance and pensions for their members. As factories closed, union membership plummeted from nearly one in three workers in the 1950s to less than one in ten in 2015. Both the decline of manufacturing and the decline of unions contributed to a widening income gap. Once the industrial heartland of America, the region fringing the Great Lakes and stretching from New York to Illinois soon became known as the Rust Belt.

This dramatic transformation of the American economy was the product of many forces. As nations abroad recovered after World War II, some U.S. manufacturers curtailed production or simply shut down as they lost increasing shares of their markets to foreign products. Japanese and German factories, newly built and equipped after the war, adopted innovative production processes that enabled their steel and automobile makers to compete with General Motors and U.S. Steel. By 2015, both China and Japan manufactured more cars than the United States, and China produced more than five times as much steel.

While some companies built plants abroad to be close to burgeoning markets there, more often companies decided to move production offshore to take advantage of cheaper labor, a constant goal of managers. Even before factory jobs began to move abroad, the Rust Belt experienced a kind of de-industrialization as companies moved production from cities like Detroit to southern states, where labor unions were weak or nonexistent and where they could pay lower wages. The athletic shoe manufacturer Nike was one of the first to exploit the advantages of production abroad, turning to Japan in the 1960s. When labor costs there began to rise, Nike shifted production to South Korea. When Korean workers demanded better wages and working conditions, it turned to China and other Asian countries. Local contractors in Indonesia paid workers as little as fifteen cents an hour as they produced seventy million pairs of shoes in 1996. Many companies, like Nike, contracted out production to foreign companies rather than employing foreign workers directly, and as a result the precise number of U.S. jobs lost to foreign workers is difficult to calculate.

Charles Seitz, who lost his job at Eastman Kodak when the company moved some of its operations to China and Mexico, was not entirely wrong when he said, “There’s nothing made here [in the United States] anymore.” Of course, not all the job losses resulted from outsourcing production. Some corporations chose another way to cut costs: increasing productivity so that they could downsize their workforces. At Kodak, for example, a machine replaced fourteen workers who previously had mixed filmmaking ingredients. The invention of smartphones dealt a further blow to Kodak, and virtually none of the phones that came with built-in cameras were made in the United States. Whether a job was lost to a foreign worker, to automation, or to a work speed-up, millions of workers saw the job security and standard of living that they had been used to for decades slip away.

In 2004, the 150-year-old company Levi Strauss, whose product had become an iconic American garment in the 1960s, shut down its last plants in the United States, contracting out the manufacture of jeans in fifty other countries from Latin America to Asia. Marivel Gutierez, a side-seam operator in the San Antonio plant, acknowledged that workers in Mexico and elsewhere would benefit, suggesting the globalization of the American dream.“But,” she worried, “what happens to our American dream?” Workers like Gutierez stood as reminders that as many reaped the benefits of free enterprise across national borders, globalization left multitudes of victims in its wake.

Questions for Analysis

Summarize the Argument: What are three reasons for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States? What were some of the effects of de-industrialization?

Analyze the Evidence: Did the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States fall in actual numbers, in percentage of the workforce, or both?

Consider the Context: The loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States was part of the process of globalization. What benefits did U.S. residents gain from globalization?