Southland Manufacturing Showing Further Decline
Southern California remains the nation’s top manufacturing center, but a steady slide in factory jobs signals that the region’s industrial strength is waning, according to a report to be released today by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
The agency’s study contends that manufacturing is at a crossroads, with further declines inevitable unless policymakers take aggressive steps to preserve the region’s industrial base and the nearly 1 million factory jobs in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
Average annual manufacturing employment in the five-county area declined by 26,300 jobs in 2001, with 19,400 more losses projected this year. Over the last decade, Los Angeles County, the heart of the region’s industrial base, has lost about 169,000 factory jobs, representing nearly 22% of its manufacturing work force. Nearly half of those jobs were in the defense industry, whose average hourly wage was $19.36.
The trouble, said LAEDC chief economist Jack Kyser, is that many policymakers believe that manufacturing left Southern California when the defense industry collapsed.
Today, the vast majority of the region’s manufacturers are small and medium-size companies without the name recognition of Boeing Co. or Northrop Grumman Corp.
Thus, although the average California factory job still pays $15.68 an hour, Kyser said the industrial sector gets scant attention from public officials, many of whom are more interested in high-tech and other “new-economy” pursuits.
“We’ve taken our eyes off the manufacturing ball,” Kyser said. “It’s a big reason why the recent census figures show that the middle class is disappearing and poverty is up.”
One of the few bright spots on the region’s manufacturing landscape has been the Riverside-San Bernardino area. The area has posted a string of strong gains in factory employment since the mid-’90s because of its abundant available land for industrial projects.
But even the Inland Empire saw its factory job growth stall last year in response to the nation’s steep manufacturing downturn.
In Los Angeles County, apparel and textile making remains the largest manufacturing industry, with about 107,000 jobs, followed by transportation equipment, instruments and fabricated metals. In 2001, the county’s 605,700 factory jobs ranked it just behind Chicago’s 606,600. If it were a separate state, the five-county area’s 996,800 manufacturing jobs would rank it fourth in the nation, behind California, Texas and Ohio.
The LAEDC recommends a plan to preserve manufacturing in the region, including reusing industrial land to create more factory sites, providing better vocational training for factory workers as well as educating policymakers about the importance of manufacturing to the region’s economy.
