Manufacturing Jobs On The Comeback

Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report from the BLS showed an increase of 31,000 manufacturing jobs during the month of February. Notably, February marked the fourth consecutive month of adding at least 25,000 manufacturing jobs.

As shown in the chart below, amazingly, we haven’t had a streak of adding 25,000+ manufacturing jobs for four straight months in the last 20 years.Clearly we’re starting to see a big turnaround in this area of the economy.

To be sure, there’s still a lot of work that can be done. Extending the chart above back to the post-WWII period, you can see that from the 1950s through the early 1980s, there were multiple streaks of 10+ months of adding 25,000 manufacturing jobs or more.