Manufacturing employment plummeted in the US after the 90s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp
Lots of people remember the 80s and 90s being better times with quality manufacturing employment without romanticizing the past. To this day multiples of the “information” sector are employed in US manufacturing.
People remember those days because the Republicans hadn't destroyed trade unions and the pension system yet.
We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.
I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.
> We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries.
I mean, they can, if you put up trade barriers or introduce capital controls. It's not a coincidence that after capital controls were removed, basically any manufacturing that could, fled America. And I (and my family) in Ireland were massive, massive beneficiaries of this!
Like, you can definitely make the argument that globalisation has benefited the world overall, while being bad for a bunch of people in the developed countries. And it's not a bad argument.
But unfortunately for all of the people who think globalisation is great, the votes of all the people who disagree count just as much as yours, and it looks like they're willing to vote for anyone who even hints at promising to fix this.
> Clinton was running the show in the 90s,
He introduced NAFTA, which made it profitable for much US manufacturing to move to Canada/Mexico. Bush let China into the WTO (or was that Clinton too?).
thanks for highlighting this. to those unaware the US currently employs 20M people in manufacturing while Information is only 3M.
so yeah even with a 'non-existent' manufacturing sector it has been able to provide more jobs than so called technology industry.