Kamala Harris touts big growth in manufacturing jobs under Joe Biden. Is that true?

WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris likes to boast that under the Biden administration, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been created.

But while the Democratic presidential nominee is correct, there are asterisks.

In California, for example, the number of manufacturing jobs is down this year and is expected to grow slowly in the near future.

Losses have been recorded even in production of computer and electronic equipment and transportation equipment. Those areas “should be job gainers given the federal government spending in these areas the past three years,” said Michael Bernick, former EDD director and now an employment attorney at Duane Morris LLP.

Nationally, net manufacturing job creation has been flat for about two years.

“As of today,” Harris told the National Association of Black Journalists last month, “we have created over 16 million new jobs, over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that as of September, 729,000 new jobs have been created, but that number is expected to be revised downward.

Another of the vice president’s claims: In an economic speech in Pittsburgh last month, she said almost 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the Donald Trump years, “making Trump one of the biggest losers ever on manufacturing.” About 178,000 jobs were lost.

Both Harris and former President Donald Trump frequently point to their eagerness to create more factory jobs. Sustaining and growing good-paying factory jobs is particularly important in some of the swing states likely to decide the election, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

So were 800,000 manufacturing jobs created?

There has been considerable growth in manufacturing jobs since Joe Biden took office.

The original estimate from the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics was that 729,000 new manufacturing jobs had been added as of last month since Biden became president in January 2021.

Then in March, the bureau revised its data and said there were actually 115,000 fewer new manufacturing jobs, lowering the total further. The official number will be released early next year.

Either way, manufacturing job numbers under Biden are up. Factcheck.org puts it this way: “Biden has seen an average monthly increase of 18,200 manufacturing jobs per month, compared to 11,600 per month pre-pandemic under Trump.”

Those numbers, though, do not take into account the bureau’s revision, but Biden’s monthly average would still be higher than Trump’s.

Were 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost under Trump?

When Trump took office in January 2017, there were 12.36 million manufacturing jobs.

That number was up and down early in his administration. In January 2019 the figure was 12.83 million but a year later was down to 12.78 million.

The Covid pandemic devastated the economy in spring 2020, and in April,, there were 11.4 million such jobs. The economy quickly began to recover and by the time Trump left office in January 2021, it was up to 12.2 million.

Harris’ 200,000 figure is correct if the beginning and end of the Trump administration are compared.

But she was incorrect when she said the same day in an MSNBC interview “Even before the pandemic, he lost manufacturing jobs, by most people’s estimates at least 200,000.”

Has California lost manufacturing jobs under Biden?

California manufacturing. Harris did not get specific about her home state.

California had 1.3 million manufacturing jobs in August, down about 27,000 from a year earlier. No other employment sector lost more jobs in the state during that time.

The August figure was roughly the same as when Biden took office.

The latest UCLA Anderson forecast, released last week, found California manufacturing among the sectors with the biggest job losses since the pre-pandemic economic peak. The report, though, did see a comeback.

If predicted that manufacturing in bigger ticket items, such as computer-related products, “ should turn around with new factories now in construction opening, increased demand as the economy grows over the next two years,”

The forecast saw an uptick in California manufacturing jobs to 1.34 million in 2025 and 1.37 million in 2026.

But there was no prediction of any sort of boom, as “the costs of the high minimum wages and the tech exodus are starting to have an impact,” said Michael Shires, professor of economics at the University of Austin. Shires was professor at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy in Malibu for 23 years..

“Often in explaining job losses in a sector, one can find one or two sub-sectors in which the losses are concentrated. That’s not the case with manufacturing, where losses are across nearly all of the major sub-sectors,” said Bernick, the former EDD director.