The good news is that there is a sustained trend of US manufacturing companies bringing production back to the US from China and elsewhere. The bad news is that this production creates far fewer jobs than it did when it left the US because of automation.
After decades of exodus, companies returning production to the U.S.
The move is part of a sea change in American manufacturing: After three decades of an exodus of production to China and other low-wage countries, companies have sharply curtailed moves abroad. Some, like Generac, have begun to return manufacturing to U.S. shores.
Although no one keeps precise statistics, the retreat from offshoring is clear from various sources, including federal data on assistance to workers hurt by overseas moves.
U.S. factory payrolls have grown for four straight years, with gains totaling about 650,000 jobs. That's a small fraction of the 6 million lost in the previous decade, but it still marks the biggest and longest stretch of manufacturing increases in a quarter century.
Harry Moser, an MIT-trained engineer who tracks the inflow of jobs, estimates that last year marked the first time since the offshoring trend began that factory jobs returning to the U.S. matched the number lost, at about 40,000 each.
The article uses an example of a Wisconsin company that shifted production of a specific component to China in 2001 and eliminated 400 US based jobs. They have now brought the production of that component back to the US but it has created only 80 jobs.
There are several factors driving this change. Essentially the US and Chinese economies are drawing closer together. Chinese workers are becoming more expensive while the wages of US workers have long been stagnant. The rising exchange rate of the yuan is also a factor. Much of the expanded US production is being located in the anti-union south where wages are lower.
Automation continues to reduce the amount of human labor required for manufacturing processes where ever they take place. There is an equation of the cost of installing high tech automated systems vs the cost of human labor. As tech advances drive down the cost of the systems and worker demands drive up labor costs, the equation yields increasing cost benefits from automation. The same process is taking place in China and Japan as well as the US.