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Kamala Harris likes to boast that, under Biden’s administration, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have been created.
But when the Democratic presidential nominee is right, there are signs.
In California, for example, the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen this year and is expected to grow slowly in the near future.
Losses have been recorded even in computer and electronics manufacturing and transportation. Those areas “must get jobs because of federal spending in these areas over the last three years,” said Michael Bernick, former director of the EDD and now staff attorney at Duane Morris LLP.
In the country, the job creation is taking about two years.
“To date,” Harris told the National Association of Black Journalists last month, “we’ve created more than 16 million new jobs, more than 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics until September, 729,000 new jobs have been created, but that number is expected to be revised down.
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Another statement from the vice president: In an economic speech in Pittsburgh last month, he said that nearly 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the Trump years, “making Trump a one of the biggest losers in manufacturing.” About 178,000 jobs were lost.
Harris and former President Donald Trump have often pointed to their desire to create more manufacturing jobs. Keeping and growing good-paying manufacturing jobs is critical in some swing states that could decide the election, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
So 800,000 manufacturing jobs were created?
Manufacturing jobs have grown significantly since Biden took office.
The first estimate from the nonpartisan Labor Bureau, 729,000 new manufacturing jobs were added in the last month since Biden became president in January 2021.
And in March, the agency revised its data and said there were actually 115,000 fewer new manufacturing jobs, further reducing the number. The official number will be announced early next year.
Either way, the manufacturing numbers under Biden are up. Factcheck.org says: “Biden has seen a monthly increase of 18,200 manufacturing jobs per month, compared to 11,600 per month before the pandemic under Trump.”
Those figures, however, do not take into account the review of the office, but the monthly average of Biden is higher than Trump.
Were 200,000 manufacturing jobs lost under Trump?
When Trump took office in January 2017, there were 12.36 million manufacturing jobs.
That number was up and down early in his tenure. In January 2019 the figure was 12.83 million but a year later it dropped to 12.78 million.
The Covid disease devastated the economy in spring 2020, and in April, 11.4 million jobs were lost. The economy quickly recovered and by the time Trump left office in January 2021, it had reached 12.2 million.
Harris’s 200,000 figure is accurate when comparing the beginning and end of the Trump administration.
But he was wrong when he said the same day in an MSNBC interview “Even before the epidemic, manufacturing jobs were lost, according to many estimates of at least 200,000 .”
Is California losing manufacturing jobs under Biden?
California production. Harris has not confirmed his state.
California had 1.3 million manufacturing jobs in August, down about 27,000 from a year earlier. No other industry lost jobs in the state during that time.
The August figure was the same as when Biden took office.
The latest report by UCLA Anderson, published last week, found California manufacturing among the areas with the largest job losses since the Great Depression. The report, however, saw a comeback.
If it is predicted that the production of large paper products, such as products related to computers, “should turn with the new factories that are opening now, increasing the demand as the economy grows in the next two years,”
The report saw an increase in California manufacturing jobs to 1.34 million in 2025 and 1.37 million in 2026.
But there is no indication of any kind of crisis, because “the cost of high minimum wages and the use of technology is starting to have an effect,” said Michael Shires, professor of economics at the University of Austin. Shires was a professor at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy in Malibu for 23 years.
“Usually in explaining the loss of jobs in a sector, one can find one or two small sectors where the loss is concentrated. That’s not the case in manufacturing, where the losses are in almost every major sector,” said Bernick, the former director of the EDD.
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