It’s a whopping statistic: Back in June 1990, there were 825,000 manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles County. This past June, there were just 297,000 jobs in the sector. That’s a loss of 528,000 manufacturing jobs, or a plunge of 64%, over the past 35 years.
What’s even worse: this trend is nearly twice as bad as the nation as a whole, which has experienced a 34% drop in manufacturing jobs since June 1990. Or, to put it another way: L.A. County has lost nearly two-thirds of its manufacturing employment base since 1990, while the nation as a whole has lost roughly one-third.
“Dense urban metropolises like L.A. County have become bad places to manufacture,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Fairfax-based Beacon Economics. “It’s all about the cost of land and labor.”
While the job losses permeate the manufacturing sector, some subsectors saw even greater erosion of jobs. Take computer and electronic parts manufacturing. In June 1990, there were 129,000 jobs in this subsector. In June of this year, only 26,500 of these jobs remained. That’s a loss of more than 100,000 jobs, or a whopping 80% drop.
Another industry that has mostly disappeared: apparel. In June 1990, there were nearly 92,000 jobs in this subsector; today there are only 17,500, again a plunge of 80%. This is part of a nationwide trend that has seen apparel manufacturing move abroad, primarily to Southeast Asian countries.
The aerospace subsector also saw a major drop, but it was more in line with the overall total. In June 1990, there were about 132,000 aerospace products and parts jobs; in June of this year, that had shrunk to 51,000, a drop of 61%.
Shannon Sedgwick, senior director of the Institute for Applied Economics at the downtown-based Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., noted that the trajectory of aerospace employment has not been a straight line down. The sector saw an upturn coming out of the pandemic, from February 2022 through this past November. But since then, it has shed more than 2,000 jobs.
Amidst all this gloom, there was one bright spot. In June 1990, there were 4,400 jobs in the pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing subsector; in June of this year, that number had risen 73% to 7,600 jobs.
