U.S. manufacturing got walloped during the Great Recession. It lost 20% of its output and 15% of its workforce. “That’s second only to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when it lost about half its total output,”says Cliff Waldman,chief economist for the Man- ufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI), a manufacturing leadership organization.
And it wasn’t an isolated hit. Waldman and economist Mark Schweitzer, senior vice president at the Cleveland Federal Reserve, both say that the economy was still reeling from the recession of the early 2000s.
