Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It’s different from mining and construction.
Our first FRED graph, above, tracks the number of employees in these three industries since 1939. After a strong buildup during WWII, manufacturing employment has stayed within a band of 11 to 20 million, with about 13 million currently. There are obvious cyclical fluctuations, but no longer-term trends after its big decline in the first decade of the 21st century. Employment has steadily increased for construction and decreased for mining.
Our second graph divides the same data by the total number of US employees. When we look at each industry’s share of employment in the economy, we get a different perspective: Manufacturing has steadily declined, construction is stable, and mining has become very small.
Now let’s look at the output of the manufacturing sector. These data don’t go far back, but we can see a marked rise from 1987 to about 2000 and then a flat trend with some cyclical fluctuations. This graph uses an index, which doesn’t say anything about the share of manufacturing output in the economy.
Our last graph tracks the share of manufacturing output in the economy: The data start in 2005 and show the tail end of the decline in the 2000s before it flattens out. Clearly, manufacturing output has done better than manufacturing employment due to an increase in productivity, in part thanks to a move to higher value manufacturing. There may also be very different evolutions for subsectors within the manufacturing industry, as well as long-run trends that any modern economy might experience.
How these graphs were created: Search FRED for the Current Employment Statistics release table and choose Table B-1 (seasonally adjusted); select the series you want and click “Add to Graph.” This the first graph. From the “Edit Graph” panel, for each line add series “All employees, non-farm” and apply formula a/b*100. You have the second graph. For the last two, simply search FRED for “manufacturing output” and “manufacturing value added.”
Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.