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Indeed, the U.S. manufacturing sector never emerged from the 2001 recession, which coincided with China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
Since 2001, the country has lost 42,400 factories, including 36 percent of factories that employ more than 1,000 workers (which declined from 1,479 to 947), and 38 percent of factories that employ between 500 and 999 employees (from 3,198 to 1,972). An additional 90,000 manufacturing companies are now at risk of going out of business.
Long before the banking collapse of 2008, such important U.S. industries as machine tools, consumer electronics, auto parts, appliances, furniture, telecommunications equipment, and many others that had once dominated the global marketplace suffered their own economic collapse.
Manufacturing employment dropped to 11.7 million in October 2009, a loss of 5.5 million or 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000. The last time fewer than 12 million people worked in the manufacturing sector was in 1941. In October 2009, more people were officially unemployed (15.7 million) than were working in manufacturing.
Wow, its been 9 yrs since the loss of the first factory..... 42,400 factories later the great one is here to bring them back.... go Obama... its all Bush's fault
I don't agree with the technical edge at all. But screw driver type jobs have been going down for decades as a chinaman can do that.
Wages make up around 20% of costs for manufacturing. It is not merely that China is cheaper, but rather they are less regulated (when it comes to manufacturing at least) and China's infrastructure is improving while America's is going down the toilet.
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