LANSING– As Mike Pence visited Michigan, he desperately attempted to spin the promises Donald Trump’s administration had broken to Michigan working families. But while lost in the spin, Pence failed to mention the decline in manufacturing Michigan had experienced under Donald Trump that was highlighted in a report on the same day.
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Michigan Advance: Michigan manufacturing sees ups and downs on Trump’s watch
Key Points:
- Michigan is down 5,300 manufacturing jobs since Trump took office in January 2017, although overall employment is up. Eighteen counties that swung from now-former President Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 lost manufacturing jobs.
- “The heart of the [economic] slowdown has really been in manufacturing. The global manufacturing sector is in a recession right now, but the U.S. is doing a little better than everyone else,” Aditya Bhave, vice president and global economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research, said during a Business Leaders for Michigan event in Detroit in November.
- Shawn Crowley, 38, works at Gerdau Special Steel in Jackson. The company announced last month it’s laying off more than 100 employees. Although he’s not one of them, Crowley said it’s been a tough few years for he and a lot of workers in the steel industry. “You have to understand that foreign companies have been dumping steel here on the cheap for years,” the Jackson resident said. “That put a lot of us at risk and then the whole tariff war comes in.”
- Wages also have been “kind of flat,” Crowley told the Advance, which has made it hard to keep up with other living expenses, like health insurance premium hikes. Nationally, real wages in manufacturing slipped 2.4% last year. “People pay a lot of attention to the stock market, but that’s not the same thing as the economy,” he said. “People make millions and billions in quick money, but they don’t think about the people who have lost their jobs. A lot of people in the country don’t see that perspective.”
