What are the U.S. counties with the most people working in transportation-equipment manufacturing? I wondered this while working on a column about Detroit. Thanks to the magic of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data viewer, I soon had an answer:
I've sorted here by employment in transportation equipment instead of a narrower category such as motor vehicle manufacturing because of a quirk of how the BLS releases county employment data: If there are so few employers in an industry in a county that one could figure out how many people work at one of them and how much money they make, the agency suppresses the data. There are lots of one-auto-plant counties. By going with the broader category, I'm less likely to miss out on them.
