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Is manufacturing making a comeback in the US? As precision spring manufacturers We decided to take a closer look at the industry that we serve.

Here’s what we found out.

The State of Manufacturing in the US

For the last several years, the manufacturing sector in the US has been growing at a fairly steady rate. During the 1990s, the trend was to buy items with the label “Made in the U.S.A.” However, that trend fell by the wayside in the early 2000s, and manufacturing in the US saw a decline. More factories were built abroad, and the industry went through a recession.

However, according to information from the Reshoring Initiative Library, that trend has reversed itself in the past ten years or so. By 2008, The first sign that manufacturing was coming back to the country was in 2009, when the number of new manufacturing jobs jumped from below 10,000 in 2008 to almost 20,000. While the economy dipped the next year, 2011 saw a return to these high numbers, and the industry has climbed ever since. In 2014, there were more than 60,000 new jobs added to the industry, a huge increase for the 12,000 jobs that were created in manufacturing in 2003.

Why are these jobs coming back to the US?

Some of it has to do with the economic recession that hit in 2008. Operating in some foreign countries is actually more expensive for manufacturing companies. Import duties and shipping costs may at times outweigh the cheaper cost of labor and materials. Producing items in the country also makes it easier to react to customer trends and to ship items directly to the customer in much less time.

Other issues that have brought manufacturing jobs back from overseas include product quality issues, environmental concerns, and a growing trend of consumers buying more products created through quality means rather than relying on the cheap labor found overseas. Some of these overseas factories have been found to be very unsafe and the employees there grossly underpaid.

The trend to buy Made in the U.S.A. products has also returned. According to a recent Gallup Poll, some 45 percent of all American consumers say that they do make an effort to purchase products made in the US whenever they can, with over half of those consumers saying they would actually pay a little more for these products rather than those made in other countries.

What do you think; is manufacturing making a return to the US?