is manufacturing a job in the future

The American recovery from the financial crisis is far from complete. The official national unemployment rate stands at 7.7 percent, as of February. But there are surprising signs of recovery, many of them in the manufacturing sector. What had been written off as the "sick man" of the U.S. economy is now a sector primed for a recovery, analysts say.

According to one estimate by the Boston Consulting Group, as many as 5 million more positions could be recovered by 2020 due, in part, to Chinese labor becoming more expensive and less productive than the American workforce. (This figure includes service-related positions, such as plant janitors and accountants.)

Not everyone is as bullish. Economic analysts question whether these jobs are capable of providing for middle-class families the way old manufacturing jobs did. And a new report by Goldman Sachs, as was reported by the Washington Post, argues that any bounce-back from the financial crisis is really the natural flow of the market, and has nothing to do with a true jobs boom.

So what's really going on with manufacturing? What questions do you want answered? AOL Jobs will host a chat on Friday at 12:30 p.m. EDT, via Google Plus. Joining the chat will be AOL Autos editor-in-chief David Kiley and Travis Parman, of Nissan North America.