Manufacturing Employment Trends in the Fourth District

Introduction

Many people associate the states in and around the Great Lakes region with manufacturing. The Fourth District of the Federal Reserve System-made up of Ohio, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and the northern panhandle of West Virginia-is no exception.

The large rise in Chinese exports after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the associated decline in manufacturing employment in the United States is commonly known as the "China Shock." In 2002, roughly 20 percent of Fourth District employment was in the manufacturing sector, nearly 5 percentage points higher than for the nation.¹ From 2002 through 2010-the period that included the China Shock followed by the Great Recession-the number of manufacturing jobs in the Fourth District declined by 325,000, and most of these jobs have not been recovered over the last 15 years. However, in 2024, manufacturing employment still made up roughly 14 percent of the Fourth District workforce, about 4 percentage points higher than the United States as a whole.²

In this District Data Brief, we use data from the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) to examine changes in the number of manufacturing jobs and the characteristics of the manufacturing workforce across the Fourth District from 2002 through 2024 (US Census Bureau, 2026).

Trends in Manufacturing and Overall Employment

Figure 1 illustrates the relative changes in total employment and manufacturing employment for the Fourth District and the nation from 2002 through 2024. The Fourth District experienced a sharper decline in manufacturing jobs from 2002 through 2010 than the nation as a whole. During this period, the number of manufacturing jobs fell by nearly 29 percent in the Fourth District and by 24 percent in the United States. By contrast, overall private employment fell by 4 percent in the Fourth District and increased by 2 percent in the United States from 2002 through 2010.