Why I Expect Further Declines In Manufacturing Jobs

This is the week I highlight further information from last Friday’s jobs report. 

One thing that struck me is that we’ve now had two months of declines in manufacturing jobs. This is something I have been anticipating since about the middle of last year, because the manufacturing workweek had been declining significantly, and it has a reliable 80+ year history of leading manufacturing jobs. Here’s the entire history measured as YoY% changes: 

The manufacturing workweek is down -1.4% YoY. So in the next two graphs, I’ve added +1.4% to that number so that it is exactly equal to the zero line. Here is that data split up into two 40 year intervals:

There has literally *never* been a time, in all of that 80-year history, when hours have been down this much for this long, and manufacturing jobs have not gone down YoY. Further, leaving out one-month YoY declines, in all but three occasions (1953, 1966, and 1995) a recession has resulted. That’s 11 out of 14 times total, with at least two of the other three being slowdowns.

In short, I am expecting further losses in manufacturing jobs in the next few months.