Why manufacturing employment continues to fall
Marketplace
Marketplace
4.6 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The February jobs report isn’t out until Friday. Still, experts are all but certain the manufacturing sector will have lost jobs compared to last year. In this episode, a weak single-family housing market and chaotic tariff policy prevent U.S. manufacturers from bouncing back. Plus: Hiring managers don’t trust resumes in the era of AI, Americans are spending less of their income on food than ever before, and a sparse snow season in Colorado stresses all sorts of businesses.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It can feel like we're at a bit of a standstill while we're digesting everything happening abroad. |
| 0:07.0 | But the churn of the economy here keeps on churning. |
| 0:10.0 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. |
| 0:14.0 | In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kaira's doll. It's Thursday, March 5th, and it's good to be here with you. |
| 0:29.5 | It's day six of the war with Iran, and there is a constant funnel of information coming out of the Middle East. |
| 0:36.3 | It's all over the news and my social media |
| 0:38.6 | feed, and it was on every lobby and elevator TV I passed coming into the office today. |
| 0:45.0 | Naturally, there are a lot of questions early on, and we've spent much of the week so far on this |
| 0:50.2 | show trying to explain what's explainable for now. But I don't want us to forget that as we wait for a clearer picture of what's happening, and whether we get it or not, the plain old regular economy here is still moving. And the biggest story of that plain old regular economy is the labor market. We'll get the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| 1:11.9 | tomorrow morning. It'll tell us which parts of the economy gained jobs in February and which |
| 1:16.5 | lost. The jobs report always brings a few surprises, but one thing that's almost a guarantee is that |
| 1:23.5 | year over year, employment in manufacturing will be down. The sector lost over 90,000 jobs in |
| 1:30.2 | 2025. It was the third straight year of manufacturing employment decline, according to the BLS. |
| 1:36.7 | Marketplaces Daniel Ackerman looks at why that is and what, if anything, could turn the trend around. |
| 1:43.1 | Manufacturing employment has been hit pretty hard in recent decades. |
| 1:46.7 | Globalization has led to outsourcing. |
| 1:48.9 | There's increased automation and the Great Recession. |
| 1:51.6 | Our manufacturing payrolls have never recovered from the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. |
| 1:59.4 | Jason Miller is at Michigan State University. |
| 2:02.1 | We lost over 25% of our manufacturing during that recession. |
| 2:06.7 | And while there was some employment growth in the 2010s, manufacturing has seen consistent job |
| 2:12.0 | losses since 2023. |
... |
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