In carefully crafted campaign messages, Vice President Kamala Harris is patting outgoing President Joe Biden and herself on the back for supposedly bringing American factory employment back from the dead. The Biden-Harris administration and its obedient media lapdogs claim the United States is now, unbeknownst to the vast majority of ordinary citizens, in the middle of a manufacturing “boom.” Harris has gone on to claim this “boom” is occurring thanks to the mislabeled “Inflation Reduction Act,” which passed the Senate thanks to Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
There are just two problems with this story: It isn’t true, and key voters aren’t buying it.
The reality is that, except for two economically disastrous months in early 2020, when businesses of all kinds were ordered to shut down by politicians hoping to “slow the spread” of COVID-19, nationwide manufacturing employment had been steadily growing for more than a decade prior to the IRA’s enactment. States with “Right to Work” laws protecting employees from termination for refusal to join or pay dues to an unwanted union as a condition of employment deserved the lion’s share of the credit for this growth.
For example, the 23 states that had “Right to Work” protections on the books for the entire decade from 2012 to 2022 experienced a net increase of 592,000, or 11.9%, in their aggregate manufacturing employment over that period. In both absolute and percentage terms, that’s roughly five times the relatively paltry increase for the 23 states that have never had “Right to Work” laws over the same period.
While U.S. manufacturing employment inevitably plummeted during the draconian business lockdowns of March and April 2020, which then-presidential candidate Biden vociferously supported, it began recovering rapidly once the lockdowns eased. From April 2020 through December 2020, while former President Donald Trump was still in office, nationwide manufacturing employment increased by more than 850,000 jobs. The manufacturing rebound continued, albeit at a slower pace, in 2021 and 2022, with “Right to Work” states once again leading the way.
Unfortunately, the long-term expansion of manufacturing employment in the U.S. may be permanently derailed by the IRA and other union-label industrial policies now being foisted on American employees and businesses by the Biden-Harris administration.
As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted just a few days before Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) rammed the IRA through his chamber, this hugely expensive legislation of subsidies and incentives unabashedly uses current and future taxpayers’ money to punish “companies and contractors whose workers aren’t unionized” and reward those who use union labor. The IRA, continued the outlet, was plainly intended to “reduce the economic advantage” of “Right to Work” states with “less unionized workforces.”
However, try as they may, the Biden-Harris administration and its Big Labor allies in Congress haven’t been able to obliterate “Right to Work” states’ decades-old advantage in manufacturing job creation. Instead, they have brought nationwide net manufacturing job growth to a halt.
From August 2022 to August 2024, the average monthly manufacturing employment gain was only about a third as great as it had been during the post-COVID-19 recovery period prior to the IRA’s enactment. While the number of factory jobs has continued to grow post-IRA in “Right to Work” states such as Alabama, Idaho, Nevada, and Texas, it has fallen in most forced-unionism states over the past two years. The most egregious case is Big Labor-dominated California, which has lost nearly 57,000 manufacturing jobs since the IRA’s enactment.
In the Rust Belt, thousands of auto and auto parts jobs have been lost recently thanks to the IRA and other Biden-Harris policies bullying manufacturers into making products politicians desire instead of those consumers want. United Auto Workers union bigwig Shawn Fain has denied this reality, insisting the electric vehicles coercively promoted by Biden-Harris are the future of American auto manufacturing. However, he is ignoring the fact that no unionized U.S. company is currently able to sell such vehicles at a profit.
Regardless, the evidence is mounting that unionized workers in presidential battleground states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, aren’t buying Harris and her surrogates’ fact-challenged narrative about U.S. manufacturing jobs. As Election Day draws near, Big Labor Democrats’ failure to pull off this deception could prove highly consequential.
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Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.