The boom in manufacturing jobs President Donald Trump forecast last April has yet to loom much yet boom. “Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs,” the Wall Street Journal reported this month.
In April 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 12,847,000 manufacturing jobs. By October the number had fallen to 12,702,000 (seasonally adjusted), dropping to 12,692,000 in December (preliminary).
This news comes as major companies across the nation announce significant layoffs. UPS, Amazon, and Meta were among major corporations planning to lay off thousands of workers.
So how is Mississippi faring in comparison?
Last April, state manufacturing jobs totaled 140,100. For all of 2025, they averaged 140,900, a third year in a row drop from 147,400 in 2022. From 2022 through 2025, manufacturing jobs fell from 12.6% of total nonfarm jobs to 11.7%.
This downward trend is likely to continue as state economic development efforts focus more on data centers than manufacturing (data center jobs are classified as telecommunications). The boom in those jobs is only a loom too. At year-end, telecommunications jobs had yet to surge from historic levels.
That’s not to say that data center jobs will not surge in the near future. They likely will. News reports project around 5,000 new jobs as these multi-billion-dollar projects build out in coming years.
Yet, manufacturing jobs declined by 6,500 from 2022 to 2025, a period when the governor and MDA also announced thousands of new jobs. Take note, too, that data centers are concentrated in four areas while layoffs are occurring all over the state.
These numbers occur as MDA Executive Director Bill Cork touts Mississippi as having its most productive economic development surge ever. Gov. Tate Reeves has touted total nonfarm employment reaching an all-time high in August.
It did, but the gains came from social assistance and healthcare, local government, accommodation and food service, and construction jobs rather than from the higher paying manufacturing and data center projects he likes to announce. National job gains announced Wednesday came in similar categories, not manufacturing.
In many ways, Mississippi reflects the nation when it comes to jobs and related rhetoric.
"For now we see through a glass darkly” – 1 Corinthians 13:12.
Crawford is an author and syndicated columnist from Jackson.


28 comments:
Thanks Bill for reminding us that Boomers sold out their kid’s and grandkid’s futures by offshoring manufacturing, customer service, and millions of other jobs. The tarrifs might be too little, too late. But Trump is not the reason for the layoffs. That would be because nearly all CAPEX in the world is being directed into an AI arms race between corporations and nation states.
Chinese AI, completely disregarding intellectual property, is now able to generate feature length movies based off IPa like Star Wars, Transformers, Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and any Anime you can imagine. This is sending shockwaves through the entertainment industry in both the USA and Japan. Sony’s last global big hit was K-Pop Demon Slayers and they’ve stolen than too! Using AI to generate notjust the character visuals, but the voice actresses and singers as well!
I mistakenly said K-pop Demon Slayers when I meant Kpop Demon Hunters. I confused it with another globally popular animated series from Japan named Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba which is likely to be stolen as well.
And if the snake pit that is the American industry of “Entertainment” goes tits up, well, boo effin’ hoo. The best thing that could happen for the US will be for California and New York to slide into the oceans.
It does not matter. Mr. Trump will announce that this is the best economy in the history of this country and he has brought back and created more manufacturing jobs than any president, anybody, in U.S. history. In fact he has done more for working class people than any single person in the history of the world. Sound ridiculous? He will say it. You know he will.
Trump's slogan should have been " Let's Make America Tacky and Uncouth Again". Or more honestly, " Vote for an American Dictatorship"!
If you lived in a dictatorship then you wouldn’t be able to call it a dictatorship. You would be too afraid to go to the gulag so you would call it a single party democracy like a good little Marxist.
I know you are just regurgitating asinine leftist platitudes.
However. I highly recommend that you read up on the testimony people living under the Marxist dictatorships you desire for America.
Trump just acts like a New Yorker. In 100 years when the Chinese write history, that’s exactly how he will be described. He even moved to Florida in his 70s like a typical New Yorker.
10:34 lives in one of these fairy tales where dictators obey Supreme Court orders that oppose them, just like Trump.
10:34, have you ever talked to a Conservative? You got all this anger about the president. Maybe, you should turn the news off and go talk to actual people. You might see what you think and what you see are two different things.
This article was written by a Mississippi pessimist.
11:00 I also do not want any dictatorship. However, throughout history most dictatorships were not Marxist. Take nothing for granted be vigilant, even here.
Not sure if anyone pays attention but jobs numbers go up and down all the time.
If Trump single handedly cured cancer Billy the democrat would bitch that DJT put oncologists out of work.
This RINO is just like Pence, they both use their “Christianity” as an excuse for their cowardice
9:25 and 9:32 Nobody cares about any of that garbage.
9:25 and 9:32 Nobody cares about any of that garbage.
Sony Pictures earned $2 billion from those franchises. You are clueless.
6:23 What do you mean "If"? You really mean "WHEN he singlehandedly cures cancer..." You know he's going to do it. He does stuff like that all the time. Doesn't he?
True, but they all rose to power by selling the sheeple Marxist ideas that they were completely for, or comfortable enough to live with - then the Tyrants began chopping heads or lining them up against a firing wall because there were too many to feed. "Useless eaters" they are called.
These are the minds of 30 year olds today.
Let’s be real Mississippi doesn’t manufacture cars we just assemble them. Nissan in Canton and Toyota in Blue Springs get their parts shipped from overseas and you know what that does to the quality of vehicles? Thats right trending downward.
Meanwhile Crawford touts job booms that exist mostly on paper and these silly data center jobs they keep lying about get counted as telecommunications jobs...funny as hell. Real manufacturing jobs have dropped 6,500 since 2022. China owns manufacturing like the US owns global defense and they are light years ahead of the completion and nobody (even the US) will catch them in our lifetimes-thanks to the boomers.
Most of the state’s new jobs are in food service, healthcare, and social assistance. So yes Mississippi could be reflecting the nation if you’re only talking about the decline of real industrial work and the rise of bs fluff jobs.
You know what this Republicans’s lament is? That TDS suffering gits like Bill call themselves a Republican.
I had some hope that Willie had turned a corner, we had a couple of articles that didn’t bitch about the mean old bad orange man but now we’ve had 2 back back to back. Apparently he’s had a full blown relapse of his terminal case of TDS.
We need to hire more doctors who specialize in TDS for all the haters and losers in Mississippi!
i dont think DJT is the greatest president ever. But the shit the cultural marxists are screeching about is so inconsequencial to me. none of it resonates. I dont care if they are brutally rounding up illegal rapists and criminals. I dont care if the are violent or mean to illegals. Why? Because legals dont have any rights! They should be happy that we the people arent executing them as foreign invaders like our ancestors would’ve!
Trump is doing things to help the economic stability of America. That is long term benefits to the country. The problem is, people today can’t think that far ahead. If they don’t see immediate change they start the bitching. We saw inflation hit 9% under Biden, we were told how great the economy was during that. Now, it’s 2.4% and you hear nothing from the media about it. We are gaslit and will be from now until the midterms.
Hear, Hear 10:36. Listening to Trump pontificate about how great he is, its like nails down a chalkboard.
Yet I still happily vote for him and would continue to do so.
Liberals are so out of touch with any single issue that matters in my life.
I'll take the orange man's cocky ass coupled with his more relevant platform all day.
Has anyone seen where Venezuela went? Isn't it down there by the Falklands?
America doesn’t make so much as a fuckin’ broomstick anymore. Well, wait. Do burgers count as manufactured goods?
@7:35
Incorrect.
We make weapons. Not the best weapons or the worst weapons. Some are better than others. Some more advanced than any one else has. But we still make weapons a lots of them.
We can make anything we want. All it takes is the will. All of the high tech stuff China is making came from us. All the magnet tech, the battery tech, the electric engine technology, all of the wiring harness designs, were invented by GM in the 1980s and sold to the Chinese in the 90s. Typical Myopic Boomers
General Motors (GM) sold its rare-earth magnet division, Magnequench, to a consortium in 1995 that included two Chinese state-owned companies: San Huan New Material High-Tech Inc. and China National Non-Ferrous Metals Import and Export Company (CNNMIEC). The deal, orchestrated through an investment firm called the Sextant Group led by Archibald Cox Jr., allowed China to gain access to advanced U.S. magnet technology developed by GM scientists, including the neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnet process.
Although the sale was structured with a condition to keep production in the U.S. for at least ten years, Magnequench shut down its U.S. operations by 2001, relocating production to China. This move effectively ended American production of high-performance rare-earth magnets and enabled China to dominate the global market.
In a reversal of this trend, GM has recently signed multiple domestic supply deals (as of August 2025) with U.S. companies like Noveon Magnetics Inc. (Texas) and MP Materials (Nevada) to reduce reliance on Chinese-made magnets, marking a strategic comeback in the U.S. rare-earth supply chain.
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