Goodish news, but I wouldn't be popping those champagne corks just yet. It seems disingenuous to me to say that the return of 10% of those losses is somehow this massive sea change. But more to the point, I think we have to be careful we don't overstate how many jobs are actually going to come back ever. This is the kicker. Even as jobs come back, technology is what it is, and we'll never see the levels that we saw (or that people have come to expect). It's also pretty sad that a big part of why this is happening is that wages have stagnated so much. I'm not sure that's worth celebrating.U.S. factory payrolls have grown for four straight years, with gains totaling about 650,000 jobs. That's a small fraction of the 6 million lost in the previous decade, but it still marks the biggest and longest stretch of manufacturing increases in a quarter century.
[One] company can now produce an alternator with one worker in the time it took four workers in China.