[LINK] "Manufacturing Moved South, Then Moved Out"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Justin Fox reacts to Paul Theroux's screed on Southern deindustrialization by taking a look at the statistics.

What seems to have happened is that the lowest-value Southern manufacturing jobs have gone to China and elsewhere, leaving behind fewer but higher-value, higher-skill jobs. Also, the union/nonunion pay gap has been shrinking in some industries, most notably automaking. The most highly compensated autoworkers in the U.S. are now those at Mercedes-Benz, who all work at a nonunion plant in Alabama.

Put these various pieces of evidence together, and the story I see is this: Manufacturing employment has taken it on the chin everywhere in the U.S., including the South. Worst-hit have been lower-value manufacturing operations of the sort often found in the small-town South that Theroux spent most of his time visiting -- although small towns and rural areas are also struggling all over the country, for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, makers of higher-value products such as cars and airplanes have actually shifted some operations to the South, but they’re generally located near mid-size or bigger cities such as Spartanburg, South Carolina, or Birmingham, Alabama. And the most successful Southern metropolitan areas -- Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, the Research Triangle -- haven't built their economies around manufacturing. The parts of the South that industrialized did so just as industrialization was going out of style.