It is a guy thing but it’s also the ‘thing’ that Donald Trump tapped to win the American presidency in swing states where manufacturing was a critical industry.
A new study by StatsCan on how the decline in manufacturing in the first 15 years of this century have impacted the labor market shows the sector has firstly, shed a lot of jobs, but secondly hit male workers especially hard across North America.
Census data shows that manufacturing has long been both a source of higher paid work but that is especially true for less educated men. Now we have a study that shows just how the decline in manufacturing jobs affected those groups.
Here in Saskatchewan, manufacturing provided jobs for 6.4 percent of the working population. So even though it has a big impact on the economy, it is not an especially big job generator ranking second lowest in the nation.
From 2000 to 2015, though, the number of people employed in manufacturing plants or factories in Saskatchewan dropped by 1.9 percent but it was almost twice that high for men.
