The Shale Boom, the Manufacturing Boom and Jobs

More drilling brings more manufacturing, but not more jobs (h/t nc links):

In March, a study by Cleveland State University concluded that while gas exploration had unleashed a surge in economic activity in Ohio, job growth - even in counties directly affected by the drilling - was stagnant. The employment growth that many assumed would follow the energy investment was "not yet evident," the study's authors said.
(link.reuters.com/qef88t)
The Vallourec Star plant, for example, will employ just 350 workers. Those jobs won't begin to make up for ones lost just a year ago, when RG Steel closed its plant here and laid off more than 1,000 workers - let alone the tens of thousands of jobs Youngstown has lost since the late 1970s, when the steel mills that drove the local economy closed.
And some recent investments, like the $100 million Timken put into a new intermediate finishing line at its Faircrest Steel Plant in Canton, are resulting in fewer, not more, jobs.
Timken's old intermediate finishing line employed more than 200 workers and processed pipe and other products in 10 days, according to plant manager Larry Pollock. The new facility, built to meet surging demand from the energy industry, employs fewer than 30 and can process the same material in as little as two hours, plant manager Larry Pollock said.
In the brightly lit and relatively quiet plant, no human hand touches the pipes as they speed down the line. Workers monitor the process at half a dozen computerized control consoles. "A lot of the old assets were standalone work centers, independently loaded and unloaded, very labor intensive," Pollock said.
Data from the state's Bureau of Labor Market Information tells the story. After bottoming out in 2010, Ohio's manufacturing sector has added nearly 42,000 jobs in recent years. But the state still has nearly 110,000 fewer manufacturing jobs today than it did in 2007, when the last recession began.
Meanwhile pay across the sector is going down, not up, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
Manufacturing workers in Ohio, for instance, have seen their wages fall 1.3 percent in the last year alone.

But signs are that the shale boom might not be as big of an impact as what was thought:

But the oil and gas business is notoriously cyclical, and that has Ballas nervous. In neighboring Pennsylvania, the drilling for shale gas "went from zero to full speed to full stop in three years," he says as he eyes the half dozen unsold tank trucks parked in his yard.
A report in mid-May from Ohio's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) suggests Ballas has reason to be cautious. The report concluded that the state's shale deposit was heavy on lower-priced gas and light on more profitable oil.
Since the oil and other liquid petrochemicals believed to be trapped here were the big draw for many drillers, not the gas itself, the report raised questions about just how much demand the industrial companies will actually enjoy as a result of the Ohio shale play - and whether some may have gotten ahead of themselves as they invested to meet expected demand.

None of this comes as a great surprise to me.  Bonus depreciation, tax laws favoring capital,  increasing health care costs and the dramatically lowering cost of computing technology have created  major incentives to invest in machinery instead of personnel.  That's been the case in each of the last three recessions, and each one has taken longer than the last to just get back to even with total jobs.  That is not a good sign for the vast majority of Americans.