Manufacturing jobs make a slow return to the Rust Belt, but with lower pay, ManufacturingCrossing finds 15,000 jobs.

May 18, 2011   |    PDF version

Pasadena, CA — Over a 1,000 applicants showed up this week at a former Hoover vacuum plant in North Canton, Ohio. Most of them were workers who had previously worked at the plant before it closed in 2007.

The plant will be making products for EdenPure from June and will be under the management of Suarez Corp. The plant will make space heaters, air purifiers, vacuums, and other small appliances. These products were previously made in China, but the production is now coming back to America. This fact is making the local media in the Midwest talk of a revival of American manufacturing.

But the manufacturing jobs at the plant will not pay what the workers were making when it was under Hoover. Under the new owners, assembly-line workers will be making $7.5 per hour, which is the starting pay. Previously the workers made $20 per hour with Hoover. Hoover itself shut down the plant to reduce its costs and shifted the production to its plants in Mexico and El Paso.

Robert Baugh of AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Council welcomed the new jobs in the Midwest but said that people realized that the new jobs offered less pay and fewer benefits than the ones that disappeared. The slow recovery that the Rust Belt is making is mainly because of the weakened dollar and lower labor costs. Several of the people who showed up to apply for the jobs said that they were making more than double of what the plant was offering but they did not have a choice.

The manufacturing sector has been one of the bright spots in this economic recovery. The sector grew almost 9.1 percent from Jan-March 2011, compared to 1.8 percent for the overall economy. Manufacturing now employs 11.7 million workers. The states that have benefited the most from this recovery are Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. These are the states that were hit hard by the decline in the steel and then the auto industries.

Factory jobs also pay more compared to other jobs for people who are just high school graduates, about 10 percent more on average. ManufacturingCrossing, a job aggregator site for all the manufacturing jobs, has found over 15,000 jobs in the sector.

Contact:
Roger Croft
Editorial Coordinator
ManufacturingCrossing
626-243-1814
rogerc@ManufacturingCrossing.com

About ManufacturingCrossing:
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