Western manufacturing employment: trends and peaks over 30 years

U.S. manufacturing employment has been declining for 40 years, but this trend has not affected all regions equally. This paper examines employment changes in the Western region since 1990 to identify trends in the basket of subindustries unique to the region. This article examines manufacturing employment in the West as defined by the census region that includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.1 This Monthly Labor Review article—the last in a series of four examining long-term trends in U.S. regional manufacturing employment—uses data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program to provide an overview and analysis of secular shifts in Western manufacturing employment between 1990 and 2019. While manufacturing employment peaked nationally in 1979, the peak in the West occurred a decade later in 1989. Like most aggregate trends in this region, the data are heavily influenced by California because of the size of its economy.