Por: Howard Schneider
WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) – U.S. manufacturing jobs in December continued an eight-month streak of declines after President Donald Trump launched aggressive import taxes on promises to lead to a resurgence in manufacturing jobs by reshaping global trade to favor U.S. workers.
The rearrangement certainly occurred, with the US collecting around $30 billion a month in tariff revenues, distributed among US consumers, importers and exporting companies abroad, and as companies first brought forward the shipment of goods abroad to stock shelves, and then reduced their purchases and reduced US import levels.
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But the manufacturing jobs boom failed to materialize, adding to bitter feelings about Trump’s economic policies among families worried about still-rising prices and uncertainty about the job market.
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Data released Friday showed the unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.4% in December from 4.5% in November, although job creation estimates in previous months were revised downward, presenting U.S. Federal Reserve officials with a mixed message of an unemployment rate that remains low by historical standards but with hiring trends that appear weak.
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The pace of job creation in the first year of Trump’s second term fell by more than two thirds compared to the final year of US President Joe Biden’s term, to an estimated 49,000 jobs per month in 2025, compared to 168,000 per month the previous year.
The unemployment rate rose only modestly as the number of people looking for work remained stable under Trump, with stricter immigration and deportation rules and law enforcement restricting what had been steady labor force growth under Biden’s looser immigration policy.
But some sectors of the economy have felt the pressure more than others. The black unemployment rate has risen from 6.2% in January, when Trump took office, to 7.5% over the past two months. The white unemployment rate, on the other hand, has remained between 3.5% and 3.8% since April 2024, and was below that for more than two years prior.
Meanwhile, hiring in the industry is down. The sector lost another 8,000 jobs in December, according to estimates from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and factory employment fell to 12.69 million last month — the lowest record since March 2022.
In contrast, jobs in the construction sector, although they fell in December, maintained the slow but steady growth seen throughout the post-pandemic era, driven recently by a boom in investment in data centers.
The much smaller mining and logging sector has also been shedding jobs, falling to 608,000 in December compared to 626,000 in April.
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The US Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a case that questions the legality of many of the tariffs imposed under national security laws, presented by Trump as a source of revenue and with the aim of regaining US industrial supremacy.
(Reporting by Howard Schneider)
