Claim: Vice President Kamala Harris said that she and President Biden have created 800,000 manufacturing jobs while Donald Trump lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
“Donald Trump tries to claim he brought back American manufacturing. The fact is, under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. And more than 1,000 factories closed under his watch. The facts. Meanwhile, President Biden and I have created nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. So much so that it has been described as a manufacturing boom,” Harris told a crowd of around 300 gathered in a high school gym in Fayetteville, North Carolina on Thursday.
Verdict: Harris is misleading about both Trump’s record and the record of the Biden-Harris adminstration.
In Donald Trump’s first two years in office, manufacturing employment expanded by 462,000 workers, an average of 19,250 workers hired into new factory jobs each month. By February of 2020, however, manufacturing employment had somewhat contracted, leaving the expansion at 414,000.
Manufacturing employment plunged, along with employment in most other sectors, when the pandemic struck and many businesses were shuttered. Total manufacturing employment fell by nearly 1.4 million in March and April combined.
Harris’s claim that Trump lost jobs is misleading because it requires holding the former president responsible for the economic consequences of the global pandemic. In fact, the U.S. economy weathered the pandemic far better than almost any other developed nation and its subsequent recovery was much faster and more robust.
Harris’s claim that she and Biden added 800,000 jobs is also 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.
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