According to the American Prospect, since 2000, the U.S. has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, with 2.1 million jobs lost in the past two years.
The American Prospect also estimates that, since 2001, 42,400 American factories have closed their doors, and roughly three-fourths of those employed over 500 people while they were in operation.
According to Moody’s, one million of those jobs will never come back. And the National Association of Manufacturers says that the best-case scenario is 540,000 of those jobs returning or being replaced in the manufacturing sector in the next five years.
I think yo is the one who needs help. Williams quote from THIS article (that's today) is "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."
No one is disputing that jobs have been lost. The whole point of this article is that the primary cause is productivity improvements, not foreign trade.