What this tells me is that U.S. manufacturing employment peaked in the late 1970s, while industrial output is higher today than ever before. It looks like the U.S. has doubled its industrial output since 1979, with about 40% fewer people working in manufacturing.
Kudos to the Freeper who pointed out several months ago that U.S. manufacturing employment would have been declining for years even if the U.S. was the only country in the world, and there was no such thing as "foreign trade."
That statement assumes that 100% of the manufactured products sold or consumed in the US would have been produced in the US.
To provide support for that, you also would have to include the number of employees in other nations that produced the manufactured products that were exported to the US. And we know millions of jobs have been lost due to the relocation of factories to cheap labor nations, and also US firms destroyed by imports with the removal of tariffs.
I know a couple of families who ran apparel plants for several decades until imports drove them out of business. And those firms simply shutdown; they did not relocate to a cheap labor nation.
The US population increase alone since the late '60s would require about a 60% increase in output, and that doesn't even include more consumption per capita and all the new products that didn't exist then.
15,000 X 736 = 11,040,000 jobs to produce goods imported by US.
And, actually, since labor is far cheaper in those nations exporting to the US, the job number would be far higher, maybe double or triple. So many millions of jobs have been exported from the US or simply destroyed by imports. You need to add 15 or 20 million jobs required to produce the manufactured products now sold in the US annually.
Of course, it was the most labor intensive jobs that were exported first.