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.
11 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.
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