Manufacturing association unveils industry jobs calculator
by May 19, 2016 5:42 pm 138 views
An American manufacturing group has unleashed a jobs calculator to track progress – or the lack thereof – on President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign goal of creating 1 million new manufacturing jobs by January 2017.
The prognosis: with less than a year to go, at 337,000 created, the President is 663,000 short. This means the U.S. will have to add 82,875 jobs per month from now until the end of 2016 to reach the goal. Through the first four months of 2016, it has added 4,000.
The Alliance for American Manufacturing’s (AAM) #AAMeter acknowledges improvements in the economy as a whole, but also highlights the struggle manufacturing has faced since the turn of the century as the industry lost 6 million U.S. jobs from 1998 to 2010.
With the last employment report released earlier this month, AAM President Scott Paul said that it would take “unprecedented job growth for the President to reach his goal of creating 1 million new manufacturing jobs in his second term. He’s not going to make it.”
Paul believes job growth in the sector is stalling because of “China’s massive industrial overcapacity and our growing trade deficit.”
“China, in particular, has targeted sector after sector, and in the coming weeks we will see the first ever Chinese-made automobiles enter our market which follows a flood of unfairly-priced steel, aluminum, paper, tires and countless other products,” Paul said.
The AAM was founded in 2007 by a group of U.S. manufacturers and the United Steelworkers, North America’s largest industrial union. The #AAMeter offers data dating back to 2013 and is available to view at this link.