Reshoring in US – Factory jobs returning matched the number lost last year

Although no one keeps precise statistics, the retreat from offshoring is clear from various sources, including federal data on assistance to workers hurt by overseas moves. 

U.S. factory payrolls have grown for four straight years, with gains totaling about 650,000 jobs. That’s a small fraction of the 6 million lost in the previous decade, but it still marks the biggest and longest stretch of manufacturing increases in a quarter century.

Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer who tracks the inflow of jobs, estimates that last year marked the first time since the offshoring trend began that factory jobs returning to the U.S. matched the number lost, at about 40,000 each.

“Offshoring and ‘re-shoring’ were roughly in balance — I call that victory,” said Moser, who traces his interest in manufacturing to his parents’ work at the long-closed Singer Sewing Machine plant in New Jersey. (He once worked there too.)

He now runs the Reshoring Initiative, a Chicago nonprofit that works with companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Several factors lie behind the change.

via After decades of exodus, companies returning production to the U.S. – Los Angeles Times.

Related articles

• Reshoring in the US / 11 Companies That Brought Jobs Back Home
• Reshoring in US / More Manufacturing Coming Back
• Reshoring in US / A a nascent trend ?
• Reshoring in US / How Walmart says it will do
• Reshoring / Apple to return some Mac production in US
• Wave of Reshoring U.S. Manufacturing?
• Reshoring in UK / China wage hike spurs trend ?
• China Reshoring manufacturing to the U.S.
• Is Apple reshoring ? / 2,000 new jobs in Arizona