Amid the chaos of on-again, off-again tariffs — many of which went into effect on Aug. 7 after weeks of uneasy anticipation — is a bid by the Trump administration to entice manufacturing back to the U.S…
New Jersey saw a long decline in manufacturing
New Jersey’s industrial history dates back to 1791, when Alexander Hamilton came to Paterson to launch the Society for Useful Manufacturers, powered by the Great Falls.
By the 1940s and World War II, New Jersey’s manufacturing capability was such that the state was part of what then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed an “arsenal for democracy.”
Hundreds of ships were laid down in Camden for the U.S. Navy, merchant marine and U.S. Coast Guard by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation.
Shipyards bustled in Kearny while warplanes for the Navy were assembled by the thousands at the General Motors plant in Linden.
By 1943, over half of the jobs in New Jersey were manufacturing, said James Hughes, an economist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
Through the following three decades, New Jersey was home to such iconic manufacturing companies as Singer Sewing Machine, Western Electric Co., Johnson & Johnson, RCA, Nestle, General Motors and Ford, becoming a manufacturing powerhouse that by 1970 employed 860,000 people and accounted for a third of all jobs, Hughes said.
With its abundance of pharmaceutical manufacturing, New Jersey earned its title of “Medicine Chest of the World.”
But eventually pharmaceutical companies began shifting their operations to other centers, such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the Bay Area in California, leaving just corporate operations in New Jersey.
Goods were eventually manufactured cheaply in the South and overseas in China, Hughes said.
“It’s really been a long-term slide,” he added.
Today, land is scarce in New Jersey, the state is heavily populated and the cost of living is high, said Robert Scott, an economist at Monmouth University in West Long Branch.
“I can’t imagine too many people want a steel mill operating in (or near) their neighborhood,” he remarked in an email.
But it’s not all smokestacks and mills.
Murphy’s administration and industry groups say the sector has turned high-tech, giving the state another chance to compete for those jobs. While manufacturers once could depend on workers to perform repetitive tasks, they now need workers who can program computers and operate lasers.