The last several months have not been kind to domestic manufacturing.
Data set after data set has depicted an American industrial sector that’s at best spinning its wheels and at worst slipping into decline. And regional manufacturing reports from Federal Reserve branches in Kansas City, Richmond and Dallas have been anything but optimistic, with an anonymous Dallas industry respondent recently indicating that “sometime after the election, historical data will show that in 2016 the U.S. was in recession.”
Whether that’s true or not, there are already signs that the manufacturing sector has fallen into contractionary territory. A recent employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed domestic manufacturers shed 14,000 positions in August, while the latest purchasing managers’ index from the Institute for Supply Management showed industrial economic activity had receded after five straight months of growth.
Yet while American manufacturing isn’t exactly thriving across the board in 2016, a new study shows industrial production still has signs of life in isolated markets across the country. Personal finance and research company SmartAsset on Wednesday published its Best Places to Work in Manufacturing rankings, which involved surveys of nearly 400 different metropolitan areas and grades based on short- and medium-term employment growth, short- and medium-term income growth, concentration of manufacturing workers in the entire population and disposable income left over after housing costs.
The results: The geographic South boasts four of the country’s top five manufacturing hubs, while Texas and Wisconsin are the only states to hold two top 10 industrial areas.
Best Places to Work in Manufacturing
1. Richmond-Berea, Kentucky
2. Charleston-North Charleston, South Carolina
3. Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas
4. Morgantown, West Virginia
5. Longview, Washington
6. Marinette, Wisconsin/Michigan
7. Charlottesville, Virginia
8. Watertown-Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin
9. Ogden-Clearfield, Utah
10. Odessa, Texas
The Richmond-Berea region of Kentucky is considered the premier location for American manufacturing, thanks largely to its 40 percent increase in manufacturing employment between 2013 and 2014. South Carolina’s Charleston-North Charleston metro ranked second, with a 29 percent gain in manufacturing employment between 2009 and 2014 and a 26 percent increase in wages.
Overall, there isn’t a single manufacturing hub ranked in the study’s Top 25 from the geographic Northeast. The Midwest and the South appear to contain the country’s most thriving industrial powerhouses.
“[F]or a variety of reasons America is not the epicenter of manufacturing that it once was, and some communities have suffered badly from the loss of manufacturing jobs,” the report says. “But it is not all doom and gloom. Some places in America are bucking the trend and are in fact great places for someone who wants to work in manufacturing.”
Across the board, the domestic manufacturing sector lost more than 40 percent of its workforce between its 1979 peak and where it bottomed out shortly after the Great Recession. Payrolls have since climbed more than 7 percent, but manufacturing’s role in the labor market in 2016 is a far cry from what it once was.
Part of the sector’s decline is tied to automation, and part is related to overseas competition and the offshoring of industrial labor. Headwinds like the country’s persistently strong dollar, weak international demand and lackluster export totals have collectively weighed on industrial performance in recent years, and have dragged on macroeconomic growth metrics.
But the manufacturing sector is not a one-size-fits-all market, and wage and employment growth enjoyed by companies in the South and Midwest are often masked by more pessimistic national averages. SmartAssets latest report shows that not all industrial production in the U.S. is completely down and out.
“Overall, one could characterize manufacturers’ current economic outlook as cautiously encouraging, but still less than desired and highly varied by firm size and export sales growth expectations,” Chad Moutray, a chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers, wrote in a research note Monday.
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Where’s the Best Place to Work in Manufacturing? originally appeared on usnews.com
