Manufacturing
The share of jobs within commuting reach of a tract that are in manufacturing, and how that share has moved over five years.
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Of all the jobs within commuting reach of a tract, the share that are manufacturing jobs. This is a measure of mix rather than of size: it describes what kind of work is nearby, not how much of it there is, so a small city and a large metro can be compared on the same scale.
The Census Bureau defines the manufacturing sector as comprising "establishments engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products," establishments "often described as plants, factories, or mills" that "characteristically use power-driven machines and material handling equipment" (2022 NAICS Manual). The definition also covers assembly of component parts, and firms that process materials under contract for others.
Manufacturing employment is unusually lumpy in space. A single plant can account for most of the sector's jobs across a wide area, which makes this share informative about a local economy's dependence on a small number of employers as well as about its industrial character. Because manufactured output is generally sold beyond the region that produced it, the sector's presence also indicates income arriving from outside the local market rather than circulating within it.
Metrics in this family#
Considerations#
These data count jobs where the work is located, not where the worker lives. A high manufacturing share near a tract does not mean the people living there hold those jobs.
The Census Bureau protects employer confidentiality before publication. The disclosure limitation applied to "the workplace component of LODES uses employer-level input noise infusion" (McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30), so a published count for any single small area differs from the underlying value. Shares taken over a wider area are less sensitive to this than counts for one block.
The data cover jobs subject to state unemployment insurance, plus federal workers from 2010 onward (OnTheMap Data Overview). Self-employment and other uncovered work are outside the frame. The reference period is the second quarter of each year.
Two coverage gaps carry through: Alaska has no workplace files after 2016 and Michigan none after 2021. Tracts there have no value for this measure rather than a zero.
The twenty sector shares sum to one. A sector's share can rise because it added jobs or because other sectors lost them, so read movement as a change in mix.
Birdseye derives these shares from the sector job counts the Census Bureau publishes; the shares themselves are not a published series.
References#
- 12022 NAICS Manualhttps://www.census.gov/naics/reference_files_tools/2022_NAICS_Manual.pdf
- 2McKinney et al., CES-WP-20-30https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-30.pdf
- 3OnTheMap Data Overviewhttps://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/help/onthemap/OnTheMapDataOverview.pdf