CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris said she and President Biden have created 800,000 manufacturing jobs.
“we 800,000 “New manufacturing jobs are being created, that's a good thing,” Harris said in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
Verdict: Harris' statements are misleading.
U.S. manufacturing added about 742,000 employee jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and October 2022, but most of those weren't “new” manufacturing jobs, as Harris claimed. They were factories replacing jobs created under Trump.
Moreover, just 20,000 new jobs have been added since October 2022, signaling a year and a half of stagnant manufacturing job growth. If anyone was expecting a manufacturing jobs boom in the early days of the Biden administration, that is long gone.
A more telling comparison of manufacturing employment just before the pandemic to current employment shows that under the Biden-Harris administration, manufacturing jobs have increased by just 170,000, averaging only about 4,000 a month.
Recent government statistics show that manufacturing jobs are falling and the manufacturing sector is shrinking.
The Labor Department said earlier this month that employers likely added 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months ending in March than previously estimated, including a downward revision of 115,000 manufacturing jobs.
The record for the first three months of the year was a gain of just 564,000 jobs, even using the misleading baseline that Harris used in her Thursday interview. If you correct the baseline to February 2020, just before the pandemic hit the economy, the gain is just 56,000. Compare that to early 2019, when factory employment peaked under the Trump administration, and the gain is just 8,000 jobs.
