Manufacturing alliance says more needed to boost sector jobs

A national manufacturing alliance has weighed in on July’s modest manufacturing jobs growth, and the messaging is clear: modest is better than negative, but there is still more to do.

Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) President and CEO Scott Paul said two months of very modest growth (June and July) “is certainly better than negative territory, where we’ve been much of the past year. Now imagine the possibilities for factory jobs if we had better conditions, such as we would have with a robust infrastructure investment.”

Paul continued: “We’ll create even more opportunities to grow jobs here by cracking down on China’s persistent cheating. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been talking about these sorts of things on the campaign trail, which I’m happy to see. But it is just a start. The next president must make manufacturing job growth a priority.”

A release also highlighted the work left to do by pointing out that the overall U.S. trade deficit increased by $3.6 billion and that the goods deficit with China alone is $29.8 billion.

The #AAMeter is a creation of AAM to track President Obama’s goal of 1 million new manufacturing jobs by the end of his second term. It now sits at just +345,000 jobs, meaning there would need to be over 131,000 new manufacturing jobs added each month for the President to hit his goal.