Manufacturing employment in US/Canada

[Docere]

Employed in manufacturing (150,000+)

Los Angeles 476,000 6.9%
Chicago 406,000 8.2%
New York 353,000 3.4%
Toronto 321,000 8.1%*
Dallas 309,000 6.9%
Detroit 237,000 10.9%
Houston 235,000 6.5%
Montreal 208,000 9%
Minneapolis 204,000 10%
Philadelphia 182,000 5.5%
Boston 181,000 6.5%
San Jose 179,000 16.4%
Seattle 169,000 7.5%
San Francisco 157,000 6.1%


* includes Hamilton and Oshawa CMAs

October 2023 BLS reports and 2021 Canadian census.

[homebucket]

^ What do the percentages indicate?

[Docere]

% of the labor force employed in manufacturing

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by Docere

% of the labor force employed in manufacturing

Interesting. Wasn't sure if it was % of population working in manufacturing. SJ's is surprisingly high here. I don't really know that many people in actual manufacturing aside from Tesla plant workers. But that would fall under the SF MSA's jurisdiction.

[Innsertnamehere]

San Jose really surprises me. Is that a data error? Isn't San Jose overwhelmingly a tech-based industry?

The rest aren't particularly surprising, though Minneapolis does surprise me a bit, I always pictured it as being more a white-collar town.

Toronto has some of the largest employment areas I've seen in North America, so I'm not surprised, especially given Ontario's manufacturing history.

Out of curiosity, could I ask what the Hamilton CMA is at on it's own?

[Docere]

Hamilton is lower than you think. 42,000, 10.2%.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

San Jose really surprises me. Is that a data error? Isn't San Jose overwhelmingly a tech-based industry?

The rest aren't particularly surprising, though Minneapolis does surprise me a bit, I always pictured it as being more a white-collar town.

Toronto has some of the largest employment areas I've seen in North America, so I'm not surprised, especially given Ontario's manufacturing history.

Out of curiosity, could I ask what the Hamilton CMA is at on it's own?

The question is how is manufacturing defined. San Jose probably has a lot of various small manufacturers doing all sorts of custom die casting, plastic molding, cameras, lasers etc etc etc.

Manufacturing doesn't have to be a 20th century style Ford factory. A lot of it goes on quietly in flex tilt-up space all around.

[Docere]

Rust belt cities:

Milwaukee 13.9%
Cleveland 11.5%
Detroit 10.9%
Buffalo 9.9%
Chicago 8.2%
Pittsburgh 7.3%

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

San Jose really surprises me. Is that a data error? Isn't San Jose overwhelmingly a tech-based industry?

Computer hardware jobs are likely categorized as manufacturing while software jobs are information.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by Obadno

Manufacturing doesn't have to be a 20th century style Ford factory. A lot of it goes on quietly in flex tilt-up space all around.

Indeed, manufacturing has moved very much away from the Fordist mass production model which it's most typically associated with.

[Innsertnamehere]

Originally Posted by Docere

Hamilton is lower than you think. 42,000, 10.2%.

Thanks. And no, that's honestly around where I expected it.

A lot of Hamilton employment is in social services, education, healthcare, and engineering / professional services. Manufacturing is mostly legacy employers who have been operating for decades. There is a reason it has one of the higher median household incomes of Ontario CMAs despite it's blue-collar reputation, and that income comes from those sectors.

Looking at San Jose's numbers, I suspected it would be mostly tech manufacturing.

I guess I misunderstood the San Jose tech industry as well, I wasn't aware a lot of tech manufacturing still occurred there. I figured most of it had been off-shored.

[Docere]

Windsor has the highest manufacturing employment share (19%) of any Canadian city.

[Docere]

NYC is just 3% and only has about 30,000 more manufacturing workers than Toronto.

[JManc]

The Tesla plant in Fremont probably makes up a good chunk of SF's percentage...if these are metro numbers and not city proper.

[craigs]

Does the Los Angeles number include Riverside and San Bernardino counties?

[Docere]

Nope but they can be added together.

Los Angeles 476,000 / 6,589,000
Riverside 98,000 / 2,176,000

574,000 or 6.5%

Combining San Francisco and San Jose:

San Francisco 157,000 / 2,552,000
San Jose 179,000 / 1,088,000

336,000 or 9.2%

[Capsicum]

I find it interesting that like the others mentioned, the most manufacturing-heavy place is not in the midwest with San Jose on the list, but the midwest still has a slight or somewhat noticeable higher amount than other regions.

It's not a really huge difference across the cities as a whole, but that also makes sense because the rust belt is the rust belt because its manufacturing dominance was in the past, not the present day.

I'd be curious for context, how heavily concentrated these numbers were in the heyday of the rust belt vs. now and how much the drop has been.

For example, was it high double digit percentages at some point and dropped to low double digit percentages and high single digit percentages?

[Docere]

I'd have to find the figures but I think NYC was the largest manufacturing center in the US in 1950. But it wasn't the Fordist mass production type of manufacturing. It was dominated by light industry (such as the clothing industry) and smaller establishments.

[Docere]

"New York had been a major manufacturing center since the earliest days of the republic. In 1950, 28 percent of the city's employed workers were in manufacturing, two points above the national figure...seven of the nation's ten largest cities had a higher percentage of their workforces engaged in manufacturing than New York did. Nonetheless, New York had a goods-producing economy unprecedented in size, output and complexity. In 1947, New York had more manufacturing jobs than Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and Boston put together."

- Joshua Freeman, Working Class New York

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Docere

I'd have to find the figures but I think NYC was the largest manufacturing center in the US in 1950. But it wasn't the Fordist mass production type of manufacturing. It was dominated by light industry (such as the clothing industry) and smaller establishments.

Ah... that makes sense. Somehow, the loss of the garment industry in NYC (or in the US in general) doesn't seem to currently at least play into the national consciousness as much as the heavy industry factory jobs that went overseas and caused the Rust Belt to be a thing.

I don't know how much of that is that the economic dependency and transition really was harder to make with heavy industry, or that similar to the loss of coal mining, the image of the loss of "manly" breadwinner jobs, even if physically exhausting, somehow got romanticized more. You don't see or hear calls to bring back the toy or clothing factory jobs much.