Creating jobs is complicated

Wal-Mart set out to create a quarter million American manufacturing jobs in 10 years. So far, according to one industry group, it has created 7,000.

Wal-Mart says its 10-year program, announced in 2013, is on track, and that the Reshoring Institute’s estimate, reported by Bloomberg News, doesn’t include jobs that are not publicly announced.

But whatever the total, it is clear that bringing the manufacturing of a product back to the United States after it has been moved offshore does not necessarily imply creating the same number of jobs that were involved in making the product overseas or before the move. Manufacturers look for the most economical way to make their products, even here.

One of Bloomberg’s examples is instructive: Dalen Products employed dozens of people to produce a certain model of plastic owl in China. When it brought the work home to Knoxville, Tenn., it improved its assembly line so that each owl would not take as much labor as it did in China.

Hiring American workers is more expensive than hiring people in some of the countries manufacturing jobs have moved to. That’s a major factor in why the jobs moved in the first place. And when the manufacturing returns, it’s a powerful reason to try to do the manufacturing with fewer jobs.

What makes a job possible is that what the worker does contributes to a product or service someone values. Jobs are created within the context of a specific need, when someone figures out what he can do that’s valuable or concludes that he can do what he’s doing better if he hires someone else to do part of it. Like any other field of invention, creating jobs is a matter of finding better ways to get things done.

All this isn’t to say that new jobs cannot be created: Wal-Mart is doing it. But it is to say that it isn’t simple. It is well for anyone setting out to create jobs, whether as a business executive or a politician, to remember that.