County manufacturing reports growth, but lost jobs

CELINA - Mercer County's manufacturing sector posted a gross regional product growth of 4.7% or $32.5 million but lost 1,221 jobs over a five-year period, according to a report issued Thursday.

Nichole Fifer, interim director of Bowling Green State University's Center for Regional Development, gave a 2023 regional economic overview during Wright State University-Lake Campus' regional workforce summit. Her analysis centered on the county's two top industries, manufacturing and health care/social assistance.

Fifer attributed the manufacturing job losses to a combination of declining population and a shift toward automation.

However, county community development director Jared Ebbing refuted those figures, saying the data is incomplete and misleading. Additionally, Mercer County's population actually jumped 4.2% over the last decade, significantly higher than adjacent counties and the state as a whole, according to the results of the 2020 U.S. Census.

It frequently has the lowest unemployment rate in the state and in January registered a labor force participation rate of 68.53% compared to the state average of 61%.

Many of the jobs that have purportedly been lost, Ebbing argued, have actually transcended the job classification or code of traditional manufacturing. The workers didn't necessarily lose employment but rather moved on to new positions.

"The jobs that once existed do not exist anymore. Traditional manufacturing jobs have evolved into advanced manufacturing, automation and robotics," he said. "We all know this area is growing. We have more people here, more companies expanding, etc. but when you code certain jobs, traditional manufacturing jobs are no longer here in the same way that they once were 10, 20, 30 years ago."

Ebbing said there isn't a code yet for these new jobs.

"So they may not show up on a chart of new jobs being created. They're just going to show jobs lost from traditional manufacturing," he said.

Fifer said from 2018 to 2022 manufacturing jobs dropped by 1,221 or 16.98% in Mercer County, 890 or 10.17% in Auglaize County, 383 or 7.49% in Darke County, 201 or 1.54% in Shelby County and 57 or 1.87% in Van Wert County.

These are nationally aggregated numbers from federal and state resources, she said.

"We are seeing this across the state as well and part of it is population loss," she said. "The other part of it is that we are seeing a lot of changes in the way that we do manufacturing."

Manufacturers responded to a contracting workforce during the Great Recession by streamlining processes and adopting automation, Fifer said.

"When the 2019 pandemic hit, the same trend occurred again where we saw a lot more investment in technology," she said. "We saw investment in process efficiency and ways to work with a smaller workforce. So when we look at these losses we can not say specifically for each county what the main driver was but it is important to take into account that that is both a state level trend and a national trend in manufacturing."

That doesn't necessarily mean regional manufacturers are doing poorly, Fifer said.

On the contrary, GRP grew by $32.5 million or 4.7% in Mercer County, $29.9 million or 2.54% in Auglaize County, $191.8 million or 10.98% in Shelby County and $47.2 million or 14.21% in Van Wert County over five years. GRP declined by $18.3 million or 2.5% in Darke County during that same period, according to Fifer.

"Has manufacturing grown in this area or shrank? I think we're all smart enough to say it's grown," Ebbing said. "No manufacturing company has had massive layoffs. Nobody has. We created jobs but the new jobs that are being created are coded differently and the lag effect on the federal government's report, that may show up in her report five years from now."

Fifer said the average manufacturing earnings in Ohio from 2018 to 2022 was $86,000. Regionally, the average during that same period was $62,861 in Mercer County, $81,736 in Auglaize County, $69,405 in Darke County, $83,261 in Shelby County and $63,207 in Van Wert County.