South Carolina keeps announcing production capacity faster than its factories can add people.
Redwood Materials opened the first phase of its $3.5 billion Berkeley County campus in December 2025 — still the largest economic development project in state history. First Solar committed $330 million to a Gaffney plant scheduled to begin commercial operations in the second half of this year. Scout Motors welded its first vehicle body in Blythewood in June, part of a $2 billion build with another $300 million going into an on-site supplier park.
The payroll data has not followed. South Carolina manufacturing employment stood at 262,600 jobs in June 2026, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — up just 0.2 percent over twelve months. Total nonfarm employment grew 0.8 percent across the same period, and construction climbed 2.7 percent. The sector attracting the state’s largest capital commitments is the one adding almost no headcount.
The Shortage Isn’t Where Most People Think
It is tempting to read that as an applicant problem. It isn’t, at least not at the entry level. When Scout Motors opened recruiting for its Blythewood production center, roughly 17,000 people signed up to express interest. Applicants show up.
The bind is replacement. State labor market data puts one-year hiring demand across South Carolina manufacturing near 27,900 positions against projected net growth of only about 1,600 jobs. Run that arithmetic and roughly sixteen of every seventeen openings exist because someone retired or moved into a different occupation entirely.
Production occupations tell the same story more sharply: about 20,300 openings a year, of which fewer than 1,000 represent real growth. The squeeze is worst in precision work, which is part of why South Carolina’s aerospace and defense suppliers are feeling it first.
Skilled Finishing Is the Hardest Seat to Refill
Not all of that churn hurts equally. Assembly and material-handling roles can be trained in weeks, which is exactly what programs like readySC are built to do — Scout’s $25 million on-site training center is a good example of the state doing that well.
Finishing, deburring, blending, and surface prep are a different problem. A capable finisher working turbine hardware or an aerospace bracket carries years of accumulated judgment about pressure, angle, dwell, and when a surface is actually right. None of that lives in a work instruction. When that person retires, the process walks out with them, and the replacement produces parts that pass inspection while sitting somewhere else entirely inside the tolerance band.
That variability is the quiet cost. It surfaces as rework, as scrap, and eventually as a customer capability study that looks worse than last year’s.
Pay Increases Haven’t Closed It
Manufacturing already pays a real premium here. Average annual wages in the sector run about $78,500, against roughly $62,600 across all South Carolina industries. Plants in the same county bid against each other for the same welders, machinists, and finishers, and every new announcement raises the bid.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 shops absorb the worst of it. A 60-person operation in Spartanburg or Anderson County cannot outspend an OEM twenty minutes down I-85, and it cannot absorb the quality swings that come with a revolving door on the finishing bench. That same math is now driving decisions across the Upstate’s power-generation build-out, where order books run years deep and a missed slot cannot be recovered.
The Argument Is Capacity Now, Not Cost
Manufacturers have started treating skilled labor as a fixed input rather than a variable one. If the people are not available at any price, output has to come from somewhere else — tighter process control, fewer rejects, less rework, and cells that hold specification regardless of who is on shift.
That has changed how automation gets justified in this state. Five years ago the pitch was cost: replace labor, save money. In 2026 it is capacity. Manufacturers automate the operations they cannot reliably staff so the people they do have move to work that genuinely requires judgment.
Production occupations remain South Carolina’s most concentrated occupational group relative to the national average, at roughly 175,700 workers, according to South Carolina’s Labor Market Information office. Manufacturing contributed about $46.2 billion to state GDP in 2024, second only to real estate. That concentration is the state’s advantage and its exposure at the same time.
The manufacturers who come out of this decade in good shape will be the ones who stopped waiting for the labor market to loosen and started engineering the variation out of the processes they can no longer count on staffing.
Forged Path Automation
Forged Path Automation designs, builds, programs, and supports turnkey robotic cells for manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, turbine, MRO, and general industrial sectors — with one team accountable from process engineering through long-term support.
Our Services Include:
- Robotic Finishing Automation — Programmable cells for polishing, buffing, deburring, and sanding
- Custom Robotic Tooling and Fixture Design — Purpose-built EOAT and fixtures validated in real production conditions
Have roles you can’t refill? Contact Forged Path Automation to talk through which operations on your floor are candidates for automation — or visit our working demo job shop in Landrum, South Carolina.
Works Cited
“South Carolina Economy at a Glance.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, www.bls.gov/eag/eag.sc.htm. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.
“Economic Overview: South Carolina.” South Carolina Labor Market Information, S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce, lmi.sc.gov/_docs/Regional-Profiles/EconomicOverviewReports/SouthCarolina.pdf. Accessed 11 Aug. 2026.
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About the Author
Chris Urban is the Founder of Forged Path Automation. His 26+ year manufacturing career spans from an international manufacturing specialist trained in Zurich, Switzerland, to corporate President and business owner. Before launching Forged Path Automation (FPA), Chris scaled an industrial gas turbine business unit from its infancy to $50M in value, directed the zero-downtime relocation of 100+ industrial machines to a 150,000 sq. ft. Center of Excellence, and led US operations for a $2.3B global firm. Today, Chris leverages his deep technical roots and an MBA to engineer turnkey robotic finishing cells that deliver total production stability and clear ROI for high-mix manufacturers. Chris holds an advanced background in both the technical and financial sides of manufacturing, combining studies in Applied Science with a Master of Business Administration.
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn to talk shop or discuss your floor’s ROI.
Follow Forged Path Automation on LinkedIn or visit ForgedPathAutomation.com.