Claim: Vice President Kamala Harris said that she and President Biden have created 800,000 manufacturing jobs.
“We created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. I’ll say that that’s good work,” Harris said in her interview with CNN on Thursday.
Verdict: Harris’s statement is misleading.
U.S. manufacturers increased their payrolls by around 742,000 workers between January 2021 when Biden took office and October 2022 but most of those were not “new” manufacturing jobs as Harris claimed. They were factories re-filling jobs that had been created under President Trump.
What’s more, only 20,000 jobs have been added since October 2022, indicating a year and a half of stagnant manufacturing job growth. If anyone was seeing a manufacturing job boom early on in the Biden administration, that has long since fizzled out.
A better comparison is between manufacturing employment just prior to the pandemic and now. This shows that only 170,000 new manufacturing jobs have been added under Biden-Harris, an average monthly gain of just around 4,000.
Recent government figures show that manufacturing employment is shrinking, and the manufacturing sector has been contracting.
The Labor Department said earlier this month that that employers appear to have added 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March of this year than earlier estimated. This included a downward revision of 115,000 jobs in manufacturing.
Through March, the record now stands at just 564,000 jobs—even using the misleading baseline Harris used in the Thursday interview. If we correct the baseline to February 2020, just before the pandemic hit the economy, then the gain is just 56,000. If we measure it against peak factory employment under Trump, in early 2019, the gain is just 8,000 jobs.