President Obama won’t reach his goal, but will his successor go to bat for factory work?
It’s the first Friday of the month. You know what that means: Jobs Day. The day the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly update to employment data, celebrity economists share witticisms on Twitter, and news wires run stories like these.
The Alliance for American Manufacturing, though, keeps its eyes on the prize: the number of manufacturing jobs created.
We’re not the only ones watching. President Obama’s campaign pledge to see 1 million manufacturing jobs created during his second term got a write-up in the Washington Post, which noted that the president is nowhere near his goal:
At the time, manufacturing insiders cheered. The national unemployment rate had fallen 3 percentage points from its high point in 2009. The U.S. economy had added 4.4 million jobs since 2009, on its way to adding 13 million to date.
But factory jobs haven’t gotten the bump the president strived for: Only 331,000 of those many millions of new positions created since the start of his second term have come in manufacturing.
That story ran on Thursday, before the new data came out, and it looks like this wasn’t much of a month for manufacturing jobs. Only 4,000 were created, and with revisions to previous months’ data, the AAMeter – our own effort to track progress toward the president’s campaign pledge – only bumped up by 6,000.
Right now, the meter stands at 337,000 manufacturing jobs created since the start of the president’s second term. And in order to make it to 1 million by January, the U.S. economy will need to create, like, 82,000 factory jobs a month. That’s not gonna happen, and that’s a bummer, and the Post story wisely notes that “larger economic forces” can really get in the way of a campaign promise.
It will be up to the next president, whomever that may be, to take up the fight for American manufacturing jobs. A lot of promises have already been made, and more will be coming. We hope that when the dust settles in a few months, those promises won’t be forgotten.