U.S. manufacturing still struggling despite city’s success story
President Obama is headed to Elkhart, Ind., today to highlight the economic progress the country has made since the Great Recession. When Obama made his first official trip to Elkhart as president in 2009, the city’s unemployment rate hit 20 percent amid manufacturing job loss.
More than seven years since the president’s first visit, the White House is highlighting Elkhart’s lower unemployment rate and manufacturing job resurgence, but there is more to the story.
Said Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) President Scott Paul:
“President Obama promised to create 1 million manufacturing jobs at the beginning of his presidency. He’s only hit 337,000 new jobs.
“The president deserves credit for preserving hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs through the auto rescue, which has been a bright spot for American manufacturing. The Recovery Act also restored jobs throughout the country.
“But while we celebrate every new job the administration has created in places like Elkhart, down the road in Gary or Huntington, things aren’t so rosy. The area is losing 2,100 jobs to Mexico, for example. Meanwhile, manufacturing has only recovered about 40 percent of the jobs lost nationally during the Great Recession.
“While this administration has been able to take two steps forward, we started five steps back. It is up to Washington to save our country’s manufacturing jobs by creating and enforcing fair policies to ensure that Elkhart isn’t just a one-hit wonder.”
The #AAMeter, which tracks President Obama's goal to create 1 million new manufacturing jobs, now sits at +337,000 jobs. That means there would need to be over 82,000 new manufacturing jobs created each month for Obama to hit his goal.