Before the COVID-19 pandemic, McLean County, Illinois, was best known as the home of State Farm Insurance in Bloomington and Illinois State University in Normal.
Now the area is exemplifying a trend that is bringing more factories to compact towns with lower costs of living: There are thousands of recent jobs making Rivian electric vehicles and a recent candy factory that will produce Kinder Bueno and other Ferrero candies.
“Food and electric cars. We weren’t known for this before 2019,” said Patrick Hoban, president of the Bloomington-Normal Economic Development Council in McLean County.
“We are primarily an insurance and university town that is currently experiencing a boom in manufacturing. Rivian increased its workforce from 300 to 8,000, and I don’t think anyone realized how quickly that would happen,” Hoban said.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to rebuild American manufacturing, and he has made significant gains in most areas that have been hollowed out by the movement of factory jobs overseas. But the recovery promised by Trump is already underway in many places: McLean County is part of an unusually powerful surge in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023 — the first time since the 1970s that manufacturing jobs have fully recovered from a recession have recovered, such a thing Current report from the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan public policy organization in Washington, DC
In 2023, there were about 12.9 million manufacturing jobs, slightly more than in 2019. However, the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen significantly since the all-time high in 1979, when there were 19.4 million, and their share is a lot accounted for a larger share, total employment fell sharply.
Joseph McCartin, a Georgetown University professor and labor history expert, said the manufacturing industry has been on the upswing since 2010, when the country began recovering from the Great Recession. The pandemic has interrupted the course, but the United States has recently seen a hopeful escalate in wages for the recent jobs, he said, as the Biden administration boosts both wages and jobs through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act wanted to escalate.
“The Biden administration has tried to use policy to ensure that more of these are union jobs or at least offer union-level wages,” McCartin said. “That approach is almost certainly dead based on the election results.”
Employers could find it challenging to fill low-paying manufacturing jobs such as meat processing if the recent Trump administration deports the immigrants who fill them, said William Jones, a history professor at the University of Minnesota and former president of Labor and Working Class History Association.
“These will be hit hard if Trump pursues his deportation plan,” Jones said. “The political rhetoric says that a lot of native-born workers are going to move into these jobs, that they’re going to be pushed out, but that’s actually not the case. Some of these industries are extremely dependent on immigrant labor.”
Where growth took place
Small urban areas like McLean County saw most of the growth in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, according to the Economic Innovation Group report. Rural areas lost these jobs and there was no change in major cities.
Sun Belt and Western states in particular saw increases in those years, according to a Stateline analysis of federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The largest percentage changes in manufacturing jobs occurred in Nevada (up 14%), Utah (up 11%), and Arizona and Florida (both up 9%). The most recent manufacturing jobs were in Texas (up 48,200), Florida (up 35,100) and Georgia (up 22,900).
Southern states like Alabama and Mississippi also saw more automotive jobs as manufacturers benefited from lower costs and state “right-to-work” laws that weakened unions. Vehicle production increased by 7,800 in Alabama and 6,600 in Mississippi, the largest escalate outside of California.
Meanwhile, established Rust Belt states saw continued declines, with manufacturing jobs down about 2% in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as Illinois, despite McLean County’s success.
Manufacturing plays a critical role in Nevada as it seeks to diversify its tourism-focused economy so it can better weather downturns like the one during the pandemic, said Steve Scheetz, research manager for the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
Manufacturing and recycling of automotive and other batteries, driven by electric car maker Tesla and battery recycling company Redwood Materials, is responsible for much of the escalate in production in Nevada, Scheetz said.
As in Illinois, job growth tended to occur in smaller areas outside major cities, such as Storey County, east of Reno, with a population of about 4,200.
“Fifteen years ago, this small county in rural Nevada was relatively unknown,” Scheetz said, adding that jobs and economic output have increased tenfold, with the number of total jobs — including manufacturing — rising from fewer than 4,000 to nearly 16,000 in those 15 years be years. The county also has plants producing building materials, industrial minerals and molded rubber, among others.
The Biden administration has focused on bringing more blue-collar jobs to compact towns like Normal and Bloomington, said Jones, a professor at the University of Minnesota.
“A lot of the growth is due to that [President Joe] Biden’s investments in manufacturing. “There was a deliberate strategy to focus on small towns to gain political advantage in places that tended to vote Republican,” Jones said.
When it came to political benefits, the results were mixed: Vice President Kamala Harris carried McLean CountyIllinois, on November 5th, but she lost Storey CountyNevada, with the largest margin for a Democrat in 40 years.
Workers’ wages
The decline of unions and the availability of cheaper labor abroad have led to failing wages in U.S. factories in recent decades. Still, manufacturing jobs remain an attractive path for workers.
Manufacturing wages remain the same ranks pretty high Among workers, wages averaged $34.42 an hour in October – less than wages in the energy sector ($39.98) or construction ($38.72), but significantly higher than in the Hospitality ($22.23) or Retail ($24.76). That was also the case in 2019, leading many states and cities to look for more factory jobs to make up for the lower-paying service sector jobs that emerged as manufacturing declined.
But over the past year, Republican leaders have pushed back on a burgeoning labor movement in the South that aims to give workers higher wages and better benefits.
In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a recent law in May that would withdraw state incentives from companies that voluntarily recognize unions. GOP leaders also in Georgia and Tennessee enacted laws They push against a resurgent labor movement and view unions as a threat to the states’ manufacturing economies.
Much of Alabama’s manufacturing jobs have grown in the northern part of the state, near Tennessee and Georgia. Since the start of the pandemic, Mazda Toyota Manufacturing has set a goal of hiring 4,000 workers in vehicle production and another 2,000 at nearby parts factories, as other manufacturers have also ramped up hiring. Private investment in automobile production in Alabama totaled $7 billion during the same period, Stefania Jones, a spokeswoman for state Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair, said in a statement to Stateline.
Supply chain issues during the pandemic highlighted the benefits of U.S.-made goods, said McCartin, a professor at Georgetown University. However, without the support of unions, it is unlikely that today’s factory workers would be able to achieve the middle-class lifestyle of previous generations, he said.
“It is unlikely that manufacturing growth itself will be a panacea for the problems of the American working class,” McCartin said.
