Before the COVID-19 pandemic, McLean County, Illinois, was known mostly as the home of State Farm Insurance in Bloomington and Illinois State University in Normal.
Now, the area illustrates a trend that’s bringing more factories to small cities with lower costs of living: It has thousands of new jobs manufacturing Rivian electric vehicles and a new candy factory that will produce Kinder Bueno and other Ferrero candies.
“We’re primarily an insurance and university town that’s just now seeing a rise in manufacturing. Rivian has ramped up from 300 to 8,000 employees, and I don’t think anyone realized how fast that was going to happen,” Hoban said.
Small urban areas such as McLean County got most of the increase in manufacturing jobs between 2019 and 2023, according to the Economic Innovation Group report. Rural areas lost those jobs, and large cities saw no change.
The largest percentage changes in manufacturing jobs were in Nevada (up 14%), Utah (up 11%), and Arizona and Florida (each up 9%). The largest raw numbers of new manufacturing jobs were in Texas (up 48,200), Florida (up 35,100) and Georgia (up 22,900).
Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi also have seen more automotive jobs as manufacturers have taken advantage of lower costs and state “right-to-work” laws that weaken unions. Vehicle manufacturing jumped by 7,800 in Alabama and 6,600 in Mississippi, the largest increases outside California.
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