Williams is full of it. We have lost 55,000 and 12,000,000 manufacturing jobs since 2002.
According to a recent study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, productivity growth caused 85 percent of the job losses in manufacturing from 2000 to 2010, a period that saw 5.6 million factory jobs disappear. In that same period, international trade accounted for a mere 13 percent of job losses.So 5.6 million factory jobs disappeared from 2000 to 2010, of which 4.76 million were the result of productivity gains from technology and around 730,000 were lost due to international trade. This is the finding of a study by researchers based on market analysis by researchers driven by a study of market forces rather than by political activism. If you have studies to refute those findings, please share them. I tend to trust free-market economists more than I trust union trade studies or advocates of big government regulations.