To hear Mike Bink, one might believe American manufacturing is about to recapture its lost glory.
Maurcie Johnson, left, and Diandre Jackson stacked locks at the Master Lock plant in Milwaukee in January.
Master Lock, which has made locks in Milwaukee since 1921, has brought 100 jobs back from China over the last year and a half. And Mr. Bink, who has worked at the plant for 33 years and heads the United Auto Workers local, is sure more will follow. “They are making a lot of capital investment; buying a lot of new equipment,” he said. “That will create more jobs.”
Master Lock’s story dovetails nicely with the budding upturn in manufacturing employment, which has rekindled hope across a Rust Belt pummeled by 30 years of job loss. Nationwide, factories have added 400,000 jobs in the last two years, the first sustained bout of growth since the 1990s, replacing about a fifth of the positions lost during the recession. Other companies, from Otis to General Electric, are bringing home jobs once thought lost for good.
Mr. Bink’s enthusiasm has echoed from the factory floor all the way to Washington. During his State of the Union Message, President Obama wove Master Lock’s tale of repatriated jobs into a narrative of recovery that could serve him well in November. “We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back,” the president said. “But we have to seize it.”
To do so, his administration has proposed a piñata of tax breaks and incentives intended to transform the incipient movement into a new golden age for factory jobs.
Things have not looked this promising for manufacturing jobs in a long while. Rising costs in China — where the government is letting the currency gain against the dollar and wages are rising at a double-digit pace — are making it more attractive for American companies to produce at home. Expensive oil adds to the cost by pushing up the price of freight.
Yet a revolution in manufacturing employment seems far-fetched. Most of the factory jobs lost over the last three decades in this country are gone for good. In truth, they are not even very good jobs.
As much as the administration needs a jobs strategy, one narrowly focused on manufacturing is unlikely to deliver.
Much of the anxiety about factory jobs is based on the misconception that job losses have been due to a sclerotic manufacturing sector, unable to compete against cheap imports. Until the Great Recession clobbered the world economy, manufacturing production was actually holding its own. Real value added in manufacturing, the most precise measure of its contribution to the economy, has grown by more than two thirds since its heyday in 1979, when manufacturing employed almost 20 million Americans — eight million more than today.
American companies make a smaller share of the world’s stuff, of course. But what else could one expect? Thirty years ago China made very little of anything. Today its factory output is almost 20 percent of world production and about 15 percent of manufacturing value added.
What’s surprising is how little the United States lost in that time. American manufacturers contribute more than a fifth to global value added.
Manufacturers are shedding jobs around the industrial world. Germany lost more than a fifth of its factory jobs from 1991 to 2007, according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, about the same share as the United States. Japan — the manufacturing behemoth of the 1980s — lost a third.
This was partly because of China’s arrival on the world scene after it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Since then, China has gained nearly 40 million factory jobs. But something else happened too: companies across the developed world invested in labor-saving technology.
Consider Master Lock. Its Milwaukee plant is operating at capacity for the first time in 15 years, before it started sending work overseas. It is producing much more stuff than it did back then. But it is doing so with 412 workers — about 750 fewer than it had 15 years ago.
“They used to throw bodies at something to get the job done,” said Ron McInroy, the U.A.W.’s head for the region encompassing Milwaukee. “Now they look at the best utilization of manpower and the best utilization of machines.”
So it is across the economy. In his forthcoming book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” the University of California, Berkeley, economist Enrico Moretti points out that the average American factory worker makes $180,000 worth of goods a year, more than three times what he produced in 1978, in today’s dollars.
E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo
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