| 2025 | 9.60 million |
| 2024 | 9.63 million |
| 2016 | 10.56 million |
| 2010 | 9.50 million |
| 2005 | 11.33 million |
* The BLS Current Population Survey combines manufacturing, agriculture/forestry/fisheries, and mining.
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The core assumption of the Trump administration’s tariff decrees is a paradox: for American working-class life to improve, working-class living standards must fall. (Samples: three TVs are too many for a working family; two dolls per girl should be plenty; no price is too high for a locally-made toaster.) Put more sympathetically, the claim is that while tariffs will raise prices for families, they will offset the cost by shifting workers out of the jobs they now have into factories. But whether or not this is what hourly-wage Americans actually want, it doesn’t seem to be happening. After nine years of elevated tariffs and other “populist” or “postneoliberal” experiments, plus 18 months of Depression-level protectionism, the “working class” appears to have gotten (a) relatively smaller, (b) less concentrated in goods-production, and (c) more centered in health care. Some data –
The 2025 goods-producing total, 9.6 million, isn’t much changed from BLS’s 2024 total. (Technically, down by 34,000 jobs from 9.630 million to 9.596 million.) But it’s well below the 10.6 million recorded for 2016, in the last year of the Obama administration. The overall “working-class” share of jobs was higher too, at 52.7% of that year’s 151.4 million employed Americans. A table illustrates the change over a decade:
| 2016 | 2025 | Change | |
| All employed Americans | 151.44 million | 163.49 million | +12.05 million |
| Salaried and other non-wage workers | 71.56 million | 81.94 million | +10.38 million |
| Hourly-wage workers | 79.88 million | 81.55 million | +1.67 million |
| … in health | 12.00 million | 13.18 million | +1.18 million |
| … in retail | 11.15 million | 11.17 million | +0.02 million |
| … in restaurants & other food services | 7.43 million | 7.32 million | -0.11 million |
| … in ‘other services’* | 2.74 million | 2.88 million | +0.06 million |
| … in education | 1.77 million | 1.96 million | +0.19 million |
| … in accommodation | 1.12 million | 0.84 million | -0.28 million |
| … in maid/domestic work | 0.53 million | 0.45 million | -0.08 million |
| … in construction | 5.05 million | 5.66 million | +0.51 million |
| Goods production | 10.56 million | 9.59 million | -0.97 million |
| … in manufacturing | 9.31 million | 8.44 million | -0.87 million |
| … in agriculture, forestry, & fisheries | 0.85 million | 0.87 million | +0.02 million |
| … in mining | 0.40 million | 0.28 million | -0.12 million |
| All other | 29.58 million | 28.50 million | -0.92 million |
* “Other services” is a BLS term of art, a miscellaneous category including personal care work in hair salons and beauty parlors, repair shop jobs, dry-cleaning and laundry, funeral homes, non-profits, and others.
The pre-tariff, Obama-era trends look somewhat different. From the financial crisis low in 2010 to 2016, BLS’ count of hourly-wage goods-producing jobs rose by about a million, or from 9.50 million to 10.56 million, with most of this growth in manufacturing. On a larger scale, the goods-producing share of U.S. hourly-wage jobs rose a bit, after falling in the previous decade. Three notes on this:
Manufacturing: Hourly-wage jobs account for about two-thirds of factory employment, as against the 49.9% of total U.S. employment. This share is shrinking, though: while shedding 870,000 hourly-wage line worker jobs since 2016, manufacturers have added a net of 624,000 employees in the salaried-and-profit-sharing tier. This suggests that modern U.S. manufacturers require more education and specialized skills than their 20th-century ancestors, while robots and computers are diminishing the number of line workers.
Prices: Trump administration tariffs, at least so far, haven’t shifted any workers from service jobs to factory work. They have, though, pushed up the cost of things like TV sets, toasters, and dolls. A Harvard Business School “Price Tracker” project reports that prices of tariffed consumer goods have risen 6.8% above the pre-tariff trend, and those of similar domestic goods by 5.2%.
Policy: The past decade’s experiments — “post-neoliberal” and “national-conservative” theorizing, industrial strategies and “Buy American” regulations, tariff hikes – obviously haven’t produced a larger industrial working class. As to whether they’ve actually made it smaller, they’re very unlikely to be the whole story. Both technological change and reduced needs for lower-skilled factory and mine work, and ‘graying’ demographics and the consequent need to add health care and social assistance jobs, must be important factors.
That said, tariffs are likely part of the story. As academic economists Kadee Russ and Lydia Cox showed in 2020, analyzing the first Trump term’s steel and aluminum tariffs — 1,000 jobs saved or created in metals, 75,000 lost in metal-using manufacturing — a “sectoral” tariff increase often gives to some (at least in the short term), but usually takes from others. General tariff increases like those the Trump administration imposed by decree last year, meanwhile, act like a tax on all purchases of physical goods – cars and clothes, oranges and gasoline, semiconductor chips and copper coil, etc. That makes both producing and buying manufactured goods and farm products more expensive at home, and also makes U.S.-exported goods cost more abroad. Against that backdrop, no big surprise to see goods-producing employment in relative decline.
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
From PPI on America’s workforce and health systems: PPI’s New Skills for a New Economy Project, led by Workforce Policy Development Director Michael Pearson.
Health Care Policy Director Alix Ware examines public health trends, Medicaid cuts, and more.
Analysis:
Harvard Business School economists track the upward drift in consumer-goods prices, 2024-2026.
Russ & Cox calculate jobs gained and lost from steel and aluminum tariffs, 2018-2020.
And Federal Reserve economists conclude that “2025’s tariffs have led to statistically significant increases in prices of consumer goods more exposed to tariffs,” and that “tariff effects on prices gradually build over time, with cumulative effects seven months after implementation.”
Data:
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Current Population Survey offers lots of different statistical insights on work, hours, hourly wage vs. total employment (see Table 45), unionization, and more, with archives back to 1999. A table illustrating (a) the long-term drop in the employment shares of hourly-wage work generally, (b) the drop in the goods-producing job share, and (c) the growth in the “health and social assistance” share.
| Total Employed | All hourly-wage jobs | Goods-production jobs | Health & social assistance | |
| 2025 | 163.5 million | 49.90% | 5.90% | 8.10% |
| 2016 | 151.4 million | 52.70% | 7.00% | 7.90% |
| 2010 | 139.1 million | 52.40% | 6.80% | 8.00% |
| 2005 | 141.7 million | 53.30% | 8.00% | 7.10% |
And BLS’ database tracks job totals, employment and unemployment rates, hiring and layoff trends, and other issues.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
