What exactly happened to U.S. manufacturing in 2000?

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by ObiWanCanownme

I’ve often felt bewildered by the below data series.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

The link shows a big dropoff in manufacturing employment in 2000, which basically never reverses.

If you look at manufacturing employment by state, in basically every single individual state, the same pattern repeats. Massive dropoff in 2000 and then manufacturing employment never really recovers.

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I understand deindustrialization and proposed causes in general, but I’ve never really understood the sharp dropoff in 2000. NAFTA had already been in effect for 6 years. The dot com bubble obviously burst, but that would seem to hit other industries more than manufacturing. And I obviously get why 2008 caused big job losses, but they were no worse than what occurred from 2000-2003.

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So what happened? Why was 2000 the year that U.S. manufacturing employment just collapsed?