The lowest level since records began
It seems as if Rhode Island has been losing manufacturing jobs for about as long as anybody can remember. But it looks like that bit of conventional wisdom needs to be updated.
The number of manufacturing jobs in Rhode Island fell to 39,200 in January 2012, the lowest level since records began in 1990. However, manufacturing employment in the state has increased by 2,000 jobs over the nearly three years since then, and has now returned to the same level as in July 2009, a WPRI.com review of U.S. Labor Department data shows.
Certainly, adding 2,000 manufacturing jobs may not seem like a particularly big deal when you consider that Rhode Island has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990. Yet what’s noteworthy is that this marks the first time in the last quarter-century that the seemingly endless slide in local manufacturing employment has come to a halt, as this chart shows:
As the saying goes, flat is the new up.
Again, these figures should be put in perspective: the number of factory jobs in Rhode Island peaked at an all-time high of 127,000 during the late 1960s, according to the scholar Neal Pierce, so today’s total is only about one-third of that level. And manufacturing’s share of overall employment in Rhode Island has slid from 21% in 1990 to 9% as of last month.
But this is still a noteworthy change for an industry that continues to attract a lot of attention from Rhode Island policymakers and average residents alike. It’s also different from what occurred after the previous two recessions, when manufacturing employment continued to drop during the recovery. Perhaps the impact of forcing Rhode Island’s manufacturers to compete with China has finally played itself out.