A month or two ago I was talking to some people who work in the community college/workforce development field, and they were rather insistent that U.S. manufacturing jobs were roaring back. I still don’t know what they are talking about. As Jared Bernstein notes in this post about today’s jobs report, manufacturing accounts for about 9% of total employment in this country, and less than 4% of our job growth over the past year. While obviously some new jobs are being created at some companies in some parts of the country, it’s actually the only industry in this slowly recovering economy that, on the whole, appears not to be growing.