Rust Bowl

A “rust bowl” is an area that used to be a manufacturing mecca, but is now decrepit and sad. It’s like a dust bowl, but for manufacturing instead of agriculture.

Here in the United States, we had some serious rust bowl action going on in the Midwest and Northeast back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which is when our economy began getting serious about its transition away from manufacturing work. A lot of the manufacturing plants that were all the rage after World War II either closed or moved to other countries, and a lot of folks lost their jobs. But some of those regions that were so rusty a couple decades ago have come a long way, and a lot of those manufacturing jobs have been replaced by knowledge jobs, like those in finance and technology and human resources.

Is the rust completely gone? No, but the rust bowl areas generally look a lot shinier now than they did 20 years ago.