In 2021, workers work at a Rivian electric vehicle factory in Normal, Illinois. A historic rebound in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 was concentrated in small urban areas like McLean County, where Normal is located, and where auto and candy factories added jobs. (Courtesy of Rivian)
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, McLean County, Illinois, was best known as the home of State Farm Insurance in Bloomington and Illinois State University in Normal.
Now the area illustrates a trend that’s bringing more factories to small towns with a lower cost of living: It has thousands of new jobs manufacturing Rivian electric vehicles and a new candy factory that will produce Kinder Bueno and other Ferrero candies.
“Food and electric cars. This is not something we were known for before 2019,” said Patrick Hoban, chairman of the Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council in McLean County.
“We are primarily an insurance and university town where we are only now seeing an increase in production. Rivian has grown from 300 to 8,000 employees, and I don’t think anyone realized how quickly that would happen,” Hoban said.
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to rebuild American manufacturing, and he has won handily in most of the areas hollowed out by the transfer of factory jobs abroad. But the recovery Trump is promising is already underway in many places: McLean County is part of an unusually strong jump in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 — the first time that manufacturing employment has fully recovered since the 1970s has recovered from a recession, according to a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization in Washington, D.C.
There were approximately 12.9 million manufacturing jobs in 2023, slightly more than in 2019. However, the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen dramatically since the absolute peak in 1979, when there were 19.4 million jobs and a much larger were part of the jobs. total employment.
Joseph McCartin, a Georgetown University professor and labor history expert, said manufacturing has been on the rise since 2010, when the country began recovering from the Great Recession. The pandemic interrupted the trajectory, but the United States recently saw a hopeful wage increase for the new jobs, he said, as the Biden administration aimed to boost both wages and jobs through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
“The Biden administration tried to use policies to ensure that more of these would be union jobs or at least offer union-level wages,” McCartin said. “This approach is almost certainly dead because of the election results.”
Employers may find it difficult to fill lower-paying manufacturing jobs such as meatpacking if the new Trump administration deports the immigrants who fill them, said William Jones, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota and former chairman of the Labor and Working Party. Class History Association.
“These will be hit hard if Trump carries out his deportation plan,” Jones said. “The political rhetoric is that a group of native workers will hold these jobs, that they will be pushed out, but in reality that is not the case. Some of these industries are extremely dependent on migrant workers.”
Where growth happened
Small metro areas like McLean County saw the bulk of the increase in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, according to the Economic Innovation Group report. Rural areas lost those jobs, and big cities saw no change.
It was mainly the Sun Belt and Western states that saw the increases in those years, according to a Stateline analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The largest percentage changes in manufacturing jobs occurred in Nevada (+14%), Utah (+11%), and Arizona and Florida (+9% each). The largest raw numbers of new manufacturing jobs were in Texas (up 48,200), Florida (up 35,100) and Georgia (up 22,900).
Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi have also seen more automotive jobs as manufacturers have taken advantage of lower costs and passed “right to work” laws that weaken unions. Auto production rose by 7,800 in Alabama and by 6,600 in Mississippi, the largest increases outside California.
Meanwhile, traditional Rust Belt states have seen continued declines, with manufacturing employment down about 2% in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as in Illinois – despite McLean County’s success.
Manufacturing plays a crucial role in Nevada as it seeks to diversify its tourism-oriented economy so it can better withstand setbacks like those experienced during the pandemic, said Steve Scheetz, research manager for the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
The production and recycling of cars and other batteries, driven by electric car maker Tesla and battery recycling company Redwood Materials, are responsible for much of the increase in production in Nevada, Scheetz said.
As in Illinois, job growth has tended to occur in smaller areas outside major cities, such as Storey County, just east of Reno, with a population of about 4,200.
“Fifteen years ago, this small county in rural Nevada was relatively unknown,” Scheetz said, adding that employment and economic output have increased tenfold and the total number of jobs — including manufacturing — has grown from fewer than 4,000 to nearly 16,000 in those fifteen years. year. The province is also home to factories that make building materials, industrial minerals and molded rubber, among other things.
The Biden administration focused on creating more jobs for small towns like Normal and Bloomington, said Jones, a professor at the University of Minnesota.
“A large part of the growth is due to [President Joe] Biden’s Manufacturing Investments. There was a conscious strategy to focus on small towns to gain the political advantage in places where there was a tendency to vote Republican,” Jones said.
If there was any political advantage, it had mixed results: Vice President Kamala Harris carried McLean County, Illinois, on November 5, but she lost Storey County, Nevada, by the largest margin for a Democrat in four decades.
Worker wages
The decline of unions and the availability of cheaper labor abroad have depressed U.S. factory wages in recent decades. Yet manufacturing jobs remain an attractive path for workers.
Manufacturing wages are still fairly high among workers, averaging $34.42 per hour in October – less than wages in energy ($39.98) or construction ($38.72), but significantly higher than wages in hospitality ($22.23) or retail ($24.76). That was also the case in 2019, and it has led many states and cities to look for more manufacturing positions to offset the lower-paying service sector jobs that have flourished as manufacturing has declined.
But over the past year, Republican state leaders have pushed back a nascent Southern labor movement that aims to deliver higher wages and better benefits to workers.
In Alabama, Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed a new law in May that would roll back government incentives from companies that voluntarily recognize unions. Republican leaders in Georgia and Tennessee have also passed laws opposing a resurgence of the labor movement, viewing unions as a threat to the states’ manufacturing economies.
Much of the increase in manufacturing employment in Alabama occurred in the northern part of the state, near Tennessee and Georgia. Since the pandemic began, Mazda Toyota Manufacturing came online with a goal of hiring 4,000 auto production workers and another 2,000 at nearby parts plants, as other manufacturers also boosted hiring. Private investment in auto manufacturing in Alabama totaled $7 billion during the same period, Stefania Jones, spokesperson for Secretary of Commerce Ellen McNair, said in a statement to Stateline.
Supply chain issues during the pandemic illustrated the benefits of American-made goods, said McCartin, a professor at Georgetown University. Without union support, however, today’s factory workers are unlikely to achieve the middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by previous generations, he said.
“It is unlikely that manufacturing growth itself will be a panacea for what ails America’s working class,” McCartin said.
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Stateline, like Oregon Capital Chronicle, is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. If you have any questions, please contact editor Scott S. Greenberger: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.
