Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.
Canada has more manufacturing jobs per capita than the US.
Is that even possible? If so, it is an eye opener for what is happening in the American economy and what is causing the MAGA movement.
Let's follow the evidence.
According to this article https://www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5375146/trump-tariffs-factory-jobs-nostalgia?
there are 12.7 million manufacturing jobs in America, down from an all-time high of 19.6 million in 1979.
According to this data base,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/437763/employment-level-in-canada-by-industry/
there are 1.8 million manufacturing jobs in Canada. Applying the standard 1-to-10 ratio (population ratio) that means scaled up proportionate to population Canada would have the equivalent of 18 million manufacturing jobs, just short of America's all time high of almost 50 years ago, let alone the current US job rate.
That caught me completely off guard. Puts a whole new perspective on what Trump is saying about the dire state of the US. Even compared to Canada, the US is in the pits.
Here is another data bomb. One quarter of those US manufacturing jobs are held by immigrants. Not sure WHAT to make of that one.
America does have a problem regarding manufacturing jobs. But tariffs certainly are NOT the solution. If Canada can out-perform the US per capita without the trade barriers of tariffs, exactly what does that say about the condition America is in?
President Diapershart wants to bring back the low paying manufacturing jobs that noone wants this time without the benefit of any labor protections for US workers
The referenced article does address the issue that American manufacturing wages are declining into the slave labor category. The decline of unionization has a lot to do with it. On the other hand, Chinese manufacturing wages are going up, moving the employees into the middle income group.
You can't just focus on number of workers. You need to take into account the productivity of the workers as well. A farm that's entirely sown and reaped by hand could have 100 workers compared to another farm that has 5 workers with machinery, and yet the one with fewer workers could produce more food and value. It'd be wrong to say the farm with 5 workers is in a dire state just because of their low worker count.
Wikipedia has a list of countries by productivity of workers. While it's not focused on manufacturing specifically, the US has some of the most productive workers in the world and is significantly ahead of Canada. We likely have more workers per capita because each worker is less productive.
Anecdotally, I work at a Canadian manufacturing plant that's owned by an American company. The machines in our plant are from the early 2000s and there's a lot of stuff still done by hand. I've heard the US plants have the most cutting edge machines and produce 2 to 3 times as much product that we do in a day. Apparently, the only reason why the company has not gotten rid of our machines and turned the plant into a warehouse is because they pay Canadian workers comparatively less than their US workers. While the Canadian factories aren't producing nearly as much as their American ones, the cost per unit ends up being less due to lower worker wages.
Not always true. BCs lumber mills were so far ahead of the US mills technologically that it was actually funny.
At least until Harper and Poilievre surrendered to the US lumber lobby.
I appreciate that you recognize that so-called ‘labour productivity’* is primarily a measure of the quality and technological level of the capital that the labour is working with.
Too often, comparative measures of labour productivity and discussion focuses on hours worked, vacation days etc.
These are very much second-order.
Education levels are not second-order but Canadian workers are more literate and better educated across the board than the US manufacturing workers.
So, the real question in manufacturing (as it is in housing construction), “Why is the Canadian private sector so unwilling to invest in ongoing technological upgrading let alone innovation?”
- ‘Labour productivity’ was originally a measure of how much a given number of workers could produce with a fixed piece of land. Crop improvements and technology increased that in the agricultural revolution.
Higher cost of labour drives capital investment to increase productivity in order to make more profit with less labour time. Lower cost of labor allows profits be made with lower productivity. Cost of labour in Canada is lower as far as I'm aware. One obvious difference is free healthcare which is not only paid by employers in the US but is also significantly more expensive.
The problem in Canada is that the apprentice program is government-controlled and monitored. If Canada put a lot more money into apprentice training, the Canadian tech industry would love to have them. It is not the wage rate that is the impediment, it is the training involved to get there. It is not the Canadian private sector that is the problem, it is the Conservative sector that just does not want to spend public money in training the work force. Private companies have absolutely no say in how Canadian high schools are operated, and what their spending priorities are.
And again agriculture and farming productivity has nothing to do with manufacturing productivity, nor with the statistics for the manufacturing sector.
Pesky things like labour laws and workers rights, as well as stronger unions, tend to get in the way of important metrics like GDP/hr.
'Farm workers' are not included in manufacturing, they are in agriculture. Mentioning farm workers makes the rest of your 'facts' suspect. In point of fact, the agricultural labor market in America is giving the manufacturing labor market a run for it money, in terms of 'total wages'.
As the article states, the remaining US industries are primarily automated, requiring fewer employees. Mexico is becoming highly automated, as the American corporate world is building the automated plants in Mecico, not America, and a lot of US manufacturing jobs are leaving for Mexico. The jobs left after automation are usually low-wage 'floor sweeper/packager' jobs.
However, all of the manufacturing jobs Trump is trying to get back are all in the low productivity range. He wants to bring back mining jobs, for instance, in an industry that is already highly automated, or steel industry hard labor jobs in mothballed obsolete steel plants that are just not viable anymore. The only way the US will bring back mining jobs is to start digging mines by hand again. On the other hand, most Canadian industries are already highly productive. If they were not, at the Canadian minimum wage they would not be competitive. Most of the Canadian auto industry jobs have gone high automation, just to be competitive. Canadian manufacturing wages are actually higher than American wages. American wages are in the bottom level of income. The Southern 'right to work' wage rate is below the poverty level. We pay our auto workers more, but they are far more productive than American workers.
The piece that is missing is that Canada by and large has a population that has obtained a much higher tech education level than the US. Whereas the US just does not have the population sufficiently educated enough to do the jobs required in the remaining high-tech high-productive manufacturing demands, Canada has the educated labor force to actually run these highly automated high production machines.
That is why China is beating the pants off the US when it comes to automation. Not only is China and Asia in general building a highly automated highly productive manufacturing base, they are producing the graduates who can design, build, run, and repair these machines.
We need to let go of the rule of thumb that Canada is 1/10th the US in population.
It’s not just a nitpick to say that’s off now.
Canada has had a more rapidly growing population such that it’s been 1/9th that of the United States for most of a decade.
A quick calculation on current population estimates puts it as 347.5 / 41.5 million = ~ 8.4.
That said, Canada still has more manufacturing jobs per capita even with the correction.
The rule of thumb is not just bout population, but in applying it to other comparisons, so I think the 1 to 10 ratio is usually 'close enough'. Certainly, if the US closes their doors completely it immigration, and as well keeps removing 'aliens', that ratio will certainly skew more and more in Canada's favor.
Canada devalues its dollar against the US, I believe by excluding shelter inflation from the CPI by only including home replacement values and not including land value in any way. We devalue it far less than China does though.
The US is attempting to bring it back via tariffs, which does work as per our Telecoms and Banks.
The way the currency is valued in China is very different than how it is valued in Canada. Canada still let the dollar float, meaning the market to a great extent determines its vale, The Canadian dollar is worth exactly what someone wants to buy/sell it for in another currency. China uses a fixed currency. It does not float. Canada used to have a fixed dollar against the US dollar.
Digging deeper, something is amiss with the reference the article sites.
https://nam.org/mfgdata/facts-about-manufacturing-expanded/
According to this cited article, Item 4 there are 13 million American manufacturing jobs.
Buried well down, item 15, foreign-owned firms employed 5.3 million workers in America in the manufacturing sector.
The way I was taught math, that represents around 40% of the American manufacturing jobs are in non-American-owned companies. Yet the article identifies this (minimizing the impact) as only 16.4%. Are Americans really this bad at math? Or this good at obfuscation? But 40% is really signifying 'branch plant economy', similar to Canada..