Pittsburgh Manufacturing

So last week new jobs data came out for the Pittsburgh region. As of September the region is showing 1.185 million nonfarm jobs in the metro area.  That number is up by 17,200 year over year which is not a huge amount of job growth (~1.5%), but it is actually the largest year over year increase in local jobs in over 5 years (since April 2012). So that is something.

But here is the bigger factoid.  Manufacturing jobs in Pittsburgh have been trending down no matter what else you may hear. As of September the total number of manufacturing jobs in the Pittsburgh region was 82,600.  Do the division and you get a surprising result that manufacturing jobs in Pittsburgh now account to just under 7% of all jobs.  6.97% to be overly precise. That has to be an all-time low.

The thing is I doubt manufacturing jobs in Pittsburgh have ever constituted less that 7% of all jobs going back to the time when George Washington was president. Even at the beginning of the 19th century folks commented on the production industries here and manufacturing likely made up a palpable part of the workforce anywhere near the head of the Ohio River.  In the early 1950's there was a point when 40% of all regional jobs were in manufacturing.  40%!  To drop below 7% is not only pushing us even further below the national average for manufacturing jobs in the economy, but I am not sure the trend is about to change in the near term. Headlines show some palpable layoffs coming in what remains of the local glass industry are in the pipeline already, among others.