Jobs report likely to show manufacturing continuing to lose jobs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its latest jobs report on Friday morning, which will tell us the parts of the economy that gained and lost jobs in February.

The jobs report always brings a few surprises, but one virtual guarantee is that, year-over-year, employment in manufacturing will be down. The sector lost over 90,000 jobs in 2025, which was the third-straight year of manufacturing employment decline, according to the BLS. 

Manufacturing employment has been hit pretty hard in recent decades. Globalization has led to outsourcing, there’s increased automation, and Jason Miller, supply chain management professor at Michigan State University, said the Great Recession had a huge impact.

“Our manufacturing payrolls have never recovered from the global financial crisis of 2008, 2009,” Miller said. “We lost over 25% of our manufacturing during that recession.”

And while there was some employment growth in the 2010s, manufacturing has seen consistent jobs losses since 2023. Miller said there are a few reasons why.

“ A lot of it ties to the weakness in the single-family housing market,” he said.

Miller said a good chunk of domestic manufacturing supports housing, like saw mills or furniture makers. So, a slow housing market can be a drag on those factories.

Another cause of the recent manufacturing decline — tariffs. Teresa Fort, associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College, said even though tariffs might be aimed at boosting U.S. manufacturers, they’ve ended up raising input costs for many of them.

“Maybe it helps steel a little bit, but all the sectors that are downstream from steel are hurt because now they have a crucial input that is more expensive,” Fort said.

That input became more expensive and just impossible to predict, she said — with some tariffs struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court one day, and popping up under a different statute another day.

“There is no way for a firm to plan with any kind of confidence of what are its costs gonna be, how long is it going to last,” Fort said.

As a result, those manufacturers aren’t doing much hiring, said Susan Spence, chair of the Institute for Supply Management, which surveys factory managers.

“These panelists are telling us we don’t know, even after Supreme Court, what other tariffs are gonna be lobbed,” Spence said. “And so our customers are ordering in very small increments because they just don't want to be ordering the higher price material.”

Spence said until manufacturers start getting those larger orders again, they won’t have much reason to staff up.