California’s monthly jobs report last week showed that we lost another 1,700 manufacturing jobs even though the state added 11,000 non-farm jobs and our our overall unemployment rate stayed the same. We continue to lag the nation’s manufacturing growth by a substantial margin since we started to recover from the recession in 2010. Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are up 5.38 percent while the Golden State lags with only a .53 percent increase.
The Labor Market Information Department also predicted in a February report that manufacturing is the only private industry in the state that is set to lose jobs over a two-year period between 2013 and 2015.
The growing and consistent acknowledgement from the Governor and his recruitment team Go-Biz that manufacturing is critcal to California’s success — given its tremendous salaries, innovation, workers and ripple effects in the economy — gives us hope that their leadership will get all Californians and policymakers to do their part to help improve this trend.
