Do Most Americans Really Want to Work in a Factory or Aspire for their Kid to Work in a Factory?

 

by Scott Lincicome, The Dispatch, April 30, 2025-  A longstanding goal of American politicians on the left and the right—including and especially the last two U.S. presidents—is to boost not just American manufacturing but American manufacturing jobs. Just yesterday, in fact, President Donald Trump celebrated his first 100 days at a Michigan community college, where he praised his tariffs and claimed to be “taking back our jobs and protecting our great American auto workers.” And almost every time the president or anyone else in his orbit defends current U.S. trade policy in the media, they’ll cite factory jobs—particularly those for high-school educated Americans—as a primary and clearly necessary aim.

The Trump folks certainly aren’t alone. Central to most economic nationalists’ support for blanket tariffs, industrial subsidies, and related government policies is that a dramatic increase in the number of Americans working in manufacturing—a return to days when industrial workers were 20 or even 30 percent of the workforce as opposed to the roughly 8 percent today—would be both feasible and desirable for both the workers and the nation. Implement a giant tariff wall, so these theories go, and you’ll have millions of Americans lined up for shifts at now-busy U.S. factories across the country, and the country will prosper as a result.

In reality, however, there are many reasons to doubt that many millions of Americans—you’d need to add roughly 20 million new factory workers to our current 13 million to get to 20 percent of the US workforce in manufacturing—are itching to work in a factory, that the jobs they filled would necessarily be good ones, or that such an increase would even be possible today, especially via trade policy. 

... In general, U.S. manufacturing is a sector in need of more workers, not one in need of more jobs. ... Then there are wages, where American manufacturing jobs’ premium over services jobs disappeared years ago. In 2023 and 2024, in fact, hourly earnings for blue collar (aka “production and nonsupervisory”) workers in manufacturing paid significantly less on average than the same workers got paid in the services sector: ...Many “worked really hard to send their kids to school so that they wouldn’t have to work in the factories anymore,” ... High-enough tariffs might be able to reshore labor intensive industries like textiles (at a massive cost, of course), but—because there’s no vast surplus of available, eager labor—doing so would inevitably come from shifting finite resources away from the higher-value activities in which our workforce specializes today.  (read more)

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