The Wall Street Journal [sub] reports that after dragging employment down for the last several years, auto manufacturer is back to driving job growth.
Manufacturers added a seasonally adjusted 36,000 jobs in July, and, within that, the motor vehicles and parts industry added 20,700 jobs, the U.S. Labor Department said in its jobs report earlier this month. Since January, that segment has added more than 52,000 jobs, while manufacturing has added 183,000.
Before the recession, the motor vehicles and parts industry tended to lose between 50,000 and 60,000 jobs in July, without adjusting for seasonality. This year, it shed only 15,700, counting the same way.
But to sustain that growth, manufacturers need overall employment to continue growing. And as Wells Fargo analyst David Vitner points out,
manufacturing has come back much stronger than it did in the last two recessions. We had a huge inventory cycle that’s helped the sector, but we’re beginning to see it peter out a little bit.
That entire curve would bias upward if you eliminated the UAW as the workers’ representative.
Screw it. I’m not going back. You can only get kicked in the head so many times before become the definition of insanity. As of 4 years ago, any auto work I do will be for fun. Which was the reason I went into it in the first place, and stayed twenty years. But the last 5 months I was there, I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And some were treated worse than me. Strangely, some more senior people (than me) were willing victims. Must have been the severence payout incentive.