Justin Fox, Columnist

Low-Pay Jobs Boom in the Slaughterhouse

While manufacturing work remains in decline, meat processing has been on the rise since the 1970s.

January 6, 2017 at 4:38 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images

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Manufacturing employment peaked in the U.S. in June 1979. After rebounding for several years after the last recession, the sector shed another 45,000 jobs in 2016, according to the employment report released today.

But there is a manufacturing industry that added jobs in 2016. And while it's not quite at its all-time peak, employment in this industry is a lot higher than it was in the 1970s. It also involves poorly paid, unpleasant work that you may not think of as manufacturing.