As presidential candidates debate free trade, foreign manufacturers and American companies are bringing jobs back while shifting to automation

When Fred Robinson moved to his cottage in 1960, it was on little more than a dirt lane surrounded by cotton fields. For 42 years, like so many others in Cleveland County, North Carolina, Robinson made his living turning that cotton into cloth, manning a weaving machine at the local Dover mill. His starting salary, in 1949, was 97 cents an hour.

In a familiar story, nearby textile mills closed and with them went the jobs. From when Robinsons mill shut in 1995 to the recession in 2010, Cleveland Countys unemployment rate rose from a low of about 3% to 17%. Across the country, industries that had sustained generations disappeared, pushed under by lower wages abroad and new machines that outpaced manual workers.

Almost six million factory workers lost their jobs nationwide from 2000 to 2010.

However, Robinsons bungalow now stands in the middle of a burgeoning industrial park. Where from his porch he once looked out at cotton fields, today, aged 87, he sees busy factories such as KSM Castings, a German car-parts manufacturer that opened in 2013 and is already expanding. More than 2,000 manufacturing jobs have been created since 2010, according to the Cleveland County Economic Development Partnership, and unemployment has fallen to 5.5%.

When I first moved up here, it wasnt 10 cars go down the road a day, said Robinson. Now, trucks make the rounds up and down his street, and Robinson far from being unsettled is excited.

Im glad to see jobs come back in. The foreign companies are coming in, theyre putting people to work and thats what they need.

The US election has renewed focus on the hemorrhaging of American factory jobs abroad, with the presidential hopefuls vowing to bring manufacturing back. Hillary Clinton has proposed to penalize companies taking jobs overseas , Donald Trump to strong-arm manufacturers into returning to the US and Bernie Sanders to make good on his longtime opposition to free-trade deals.

Were losing our jobs to China, to Japan, to every country, Trump has said, emphasizing that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost.

In fact, manufacturing employment is inching upwards again and, in some parts of the country, there are signs that foreign manufacturers, drawn to set up shop in the US itself, could be helping it do so. Traditional manual jobs are unlikely to return, but factors such as a desire to enter the American market directly, the inconvenience of shipping across the world and rising wages in China have created the potential for a shift of advanced manufacturing back to the US. A few dozen highly trained workers will be able to program machines to efficiently produce goods that previously required factories of hundreds.

Could this halt the decline? In much of the south-east, for example, local government and business groups hope that foreign manufacturers, as well as jobs reshored to the US by American companies, will help create stability after a devastating decade of layoffs. North and South Carolina were among the top three states for manufacturing jobs returning or created from overseas in 2015, according to the Reshoring Initiative.

Theres definitely a glimmer of hope there now, said Douglas Woodward, a professor of economics at the University of South Carolina.

Inside KSM Castings, Ric Ruppe stands at the end of a conveyor belt, watching as an enormous robotic arm smoothly delivers a freshly cast transmission housing the 200th of the day. He checks the part is good, then packs it into a crate.

All this automation, all these robots its really new to me, he said. Ruppe spent 40 years manually building machine parts before joining KSM in September 2015. Unlike former colleagues who resent the advent of automation, hes optimistic about the future of the industry.

It helped me out; I hope it can help them out too, he said.

If Ruppe is used to doing things the old way, Aivy Nguyen is firmly schooled in the new. The 19-year-old student at nearby Charlottes Central Piedmont community college is in her third year of an apprenticeship with Chiron, another German company making machine tools. Taking a curriculum that involves computer programming and electrical engineering, she will go on to run highly automated production lines.

A lot of people say the automation industry is taking over jobs, she said. I feel like its the future, and it will benefit upcoming young adults.

Yet many point to the disappearance of the manual factory jobs that once sustained entire towns as a driving force behind the erosion of middle-class stability and increasing inequality.

I think it is creating a gulf in the US, which is a very critical problem to address, said Willy Shih, a professor of management at Harvard Business School. We tend to take for granted the benefits, which are lower-cost products, but then theres also a price associated with that. Thats at the heart of the political debate.

Matthew Enos, for one, is unlikely to return to manufacturing. He was laid off in 2010 after two years working in an industrial plastics factory, and between caring for his great-grandfather and a spell working at a convenience store, the 33-year-old from Lancaster County, South Carolina, has been unemployed since.

I dont see any revival in Lancaster, he said. He voted for Sanders, but says that Trumps rhetoric has been received more enthusiastically in the area than anyone elses: Just the anger that he projects taps into the anger and frustration that this area feels. Enos now plans to begin looking for entry-level jobs in call centers and elsewhere.

The manufacturing jobs recovered since 2010 remain a fraction of those lost in the preceding decade. The jury is still out as to whether this revival could ultimately halt that long-term decline and, if so, what that would mean for American workers.

I would say that while the economic activity could be being brought back the reshoring could be being brought back I dont think that jobs will be brought back, said Chad P Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute.

In Cleveland County, security guard Bruce Eaker kept watch over an empty factory for five years after a DVD maker, which employed 500 people, closed. Now, in a twist for a region that lost its fabric industry to countries like China, Chinese textile producer Uniquetex has moved into the building and will open next year. It plans to hire 150 people over five years.

One hundred fifty is gonna be a drop in the bucket compared to 500, Eaker said. Still, he is watching intently. Industries are beginning to come, hopefully things are starting to come back.

Woodward, of the University of South Carolina, believes that a trend towards large investment without a corresponding rise in employment is a key challenge for the future of manufacturing in the US.

There are jobs, he said, but there just arent enough.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/manufacturing-industry-america-jobs-election-politics