America’s shifting auto jobs landscape

Plants are a Midwest fixture, but the South is gaining jobs

By Bob Vavra June 1, 2009

USA Today prepared a map showing the location of automobile manufacturing jobs in the United States. To no one’s surprise, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana have the largest concentration of the manufacturing and parts jobs in the auto industry.

What emerges from the data is a picture of how the automobile manufacturing landscape is shifting. With companies such as Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen and Kia locating plants in the South, that region now has more than 250,000 automobile manufacturing and sales jobs, or the same number as Michigan. Tennessee and Kentucky lead the charge, and Tennessee will get a new Volkswagen plant on line by 2010.


Author Bio: Bob is the Content Manager for Plant Engineering.