The boom in manufacturing jobs President Donald Trump forecast last April has yet to loom much yet boom. “Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs,” the Wall Street Journal reported this month.
In April 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 12,847,000 manufacturing jobs. By October the number had fallen to 12,702,000 (seasonally adjusted), dropping to 12,692,000 in December (preliminary).
This news comes as major companies across the nation announce significant layoffs. UPS, Amazon, and Meta were among major corporations planning to lay off thousands of workers.
So how is Mississippi faring in comparison?
Last April, state manufacturing jobs totaled 140,100. For all of 2025, they averaged 140,900, a third year in a row drop from 147,400 in 2022. From 2022 through 2025, manufacturing jobs fell from 12.6% of total nonfarm jobs to 11.7%.
This downward trend is likely to continue as state economic development efforts focus more on data centers than manufacturing (data center jobs are classified as telecommunications). The boom in those jobs is only a loom too. At year-end, telecommunications jobs had yet to surge from historic levels.
That’s not to say that data center jobs will not surge in the near future. They likely will. News reports project around 5,000 new jobs as these multi-billion-dollar projects build out in coming years.
Yet, manufacturing jobs declined by 6,500 from 2022 to 2025, a period when the governor and MDA also announced thousands of new jobs. Take note, too, that data centers are concentrated in four areas while layoffs are occurring all over the state.
Mississippi has not had layoffs in the thousands, but the layoffs we had in 2025 were proportionate to those huge national layoffs. For example, the 176 worker paper mill layoff in Grenada was a slightly higher proportion of Mississippi total employment than the 16,000 Amazon worker layoff was to U.S. total employment. For all of 2025, 16 Mississippi companies issued WARN layoff notices to 1,731 workers.
These numbers occur as MDA Executive Director Bill Cork touts Mississippi as having its most productive economic development surge ever. Gov. Tate Reeves has touted total nonfarm employment reaching an all-time high in August.
It did, but the gains came from social assistance and healthcare, local government, accommodation and food service, and construction jobs rather than from the higher paying manufacturing and data center projects he likes to announce. National job gains announced Wednesday came in similar categories, not manufacturing.
In many ways, Mississippi reflects the nation when it comes to jobs and related rhetoric.
"For now we see through a glass darkly” – 1 Corinthians 13:12.
BillCrawford is an author and syndicated columnist from Jackson.
