The theory behind President Donald Trump's massive wave of tariffs is that they're a way to usher in a renaissance in American manufacturing. The idea is to make America the 1950s again, labor-wise.
The Industrial Revolution brought American workers from rural farms to urban factories. And over the past several decades, those factory workers have found new homes, work-wise, in services — in hospitality and tech and healthcare and basically anything that's not making an actual, tangible thing. American manufacturing, though still second only to China globally, has declined. Trump has pledged to reverse that trend, but it's a tall order.
Plenty of people agree with Trump that the US should bring back its industrial sector — an August poll found that 80% of Americans think the country would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing than do these days. The rub is that people are not so jazzed about working in manufacturing themselves. That same poll found that just 25% of Americans think they'd be better off working in a factory.
There is also a distinctly "manly" edge to Trump's pronouncements. When the president talks about bringing back jobs, he means specific kinds of jobs — ones in manufacturing, mining, construction — positions that have historically been held by men and coded as masculine. His supporters understand that, too. Over on Fox News, hosts have described Trump's tariffs as the "ultimate testosterone boost," with one declaring that working from behind a screen "makes you a woman."
Macho considerations aside, reshoring supply chains and manufacturing operations would take years to execute. Given the day-to-day chaos coming out of the White House on tariff policy, many businesses are disinclined to make any moves. US manufacturing's troubles have had to do with more than just globalization and cheaper options. Technological innovations have changed what manufacturing work looks like and how many people are needed to do it.
And then there's the aforementioned labor force problem: The guy sitting in an air-conditioned office with a comfy email job is not falling over himself to get back on the assembly line. The same goes for the janitor at the local school — the quality of many manufacturing jobs has morphed to the point that there's no guarantee the factory would pay significantly more or offer better benefits, but it might still require mandatory overtime.
"You're up against these huge technological changes in addition to trade and in addition to the fact that people are getting more educated, the country's growing richer, and there are these other jobs in the service sector, which people have gravitated toward," Kyle Handley, an economist at the University of California, San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, said. "There are a lot of jobs that I think if we sit and think about it for a minute, maybe we are happy that nobody in the US has to do that anymore."
Back in 2017, Dave Chapelle joked, "I want to wear Nikes, I don't want to make them sh—s." For better or worse, that's how many people feel. The Great American Manufacturing Revival is a group project no one wants to participate in. American workers' response to Trump's desire to inject supposed masculinity back into the labor market is a shrug.
The United States is already facing a manufacturing worker shortage. An April 2024 report from Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute found that about half of the 3.8 million new manufacturing jobs expected to open up by 2033 are likely to go unfilled. That's for a variety of reasons — an aging labor force, a downtrend in immigration, a lack of workers trained for the roles, and changing career trends. Millennials and Gen Zers know their parents' and grandparents' factory jobs aren't available to them, and even if they were, they don't necessarily want them. A recent post on X juxtaposed a pair of job ads in Tennessee, one at a car wash, the other at a nearby Nissan plant. The car wash job paid more. It's also probably more fun.
"It's hard to reconcile this alleged great appetite with the fact that we're struggling to fill all the manufacturing jobs we already have," said Colin Grabow, who researches trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Bringing back a manufacturing job is far from a panacea for job quality in the US.The rhetorical response is that these manufacturing jobs the White House is trying to bring back would be "good" jobs — the kind with stable trajectories, good pay to last throughout your working life, and solid pensions to take care of you in your golden years. But in practice, modern manufacturing jobs don't really meet those criteria anymore. Average earnings for manufacturing employees in the US are now less than they are for workers overall. Union membership in the US has been declining for decades, which has diminished the movement that boosted their workers' wages and fought for the rights that once made manufacturing jobs so compelling.
"Bringing back a manufacturing job is far from a panacea for job quality in the US," said Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. "The reason we thought those were good jobs and they were often back in the day is they were unionized, and if we bring back a bunch of nonunionized manufacturing jobs in the US, it won't happen."
There's a level of nostalgia to the conversation around an American industrial revival. Its proponents talk about it in an idyllic fashion — they tend to harken back to the 1950s when men were the breadwinners, their wives didn't have to work, and the US economy was emerging from the Great Depression and two World Wars. They paper over some of the realities of the time, such as the danger, monotony, and physical toll of many of those jobs. They also ignore that America is in a very different place than it was then.
"I think people have in their head that manufacturing is working for UAW, getting paid pretty well, a unionized job with a nice pension," Grabow said. "And that's just not the world we live in anymore."
Because of the aforementioned decline in unionization, workers in manufacturing — and many industries — don't have the same protections and collective bargaining leverage they once did. Technological advances make cost-cutting, including via labor reductions, easier than ever for businesses. Traditionally "masculine" jobs aren't what the American economy most needs, or what manufacturing really looks like anymore.
Many of the jobs that manufacturers have sent to other countries are ones that American workers do not want to do, much less the kind of brawny jobs requiring lots of heavy lifting and machinery that the masculinity crowd imagines. They don't want to toil away in garment factories or iPhone assembly plants for hours on end. (We'll leave for another day whether anyone should do this work, especially at dirt-cheap wages.) Chinese social media users have begun to circulate memes and videos depicting Americans doing this type of tough and tedious manual labor to make this point.
"It's hard to imagine American workers wanting to sit at a sewing machine and repetitively sew for $7.50, $8 an hour, and even that's going to drive up Nike's production costs such that a pair of Nikes will go through the roof," Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said.
This unwillingness to take on menial tasks at the lower end of the value chain is part of the country's economic development. America is a wealthier country, people have a higher standard of living and money to spend, including on things and experiences they want instead of need.
"We get to have all this amazing electronics and communications equipment and fancy cars and electric cars and all this battery-powered stuff," Hadley said. "It may not be made in the United States, but we are able to afford it at reasonably low prices on our service-sector salaries. I think most people don't want to give that up so that we can bring back a few hundred thousand manufacturing jobs."
Setting aside Americans' willingness — or lack thereof — to take them on, it's not clear how many of those types of grueling, thankless, repetitive jobs would even come back. Many of the toughest manufacturing jobs can be and already have been automated. In turn, Trump's tariff battle could result in the addition of no, or very few, new jobs in the sector he specifically counts as the barometer for success.
"Technological change has reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, so there are not 1950s-style manufacturing jobs," Stevenson said.
Some members of the president's team have admitted as much. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been quite clear that the use of robotics and automation is part of the plan. The White House contends that the robot jobs will create other jobs for humans, such as taking care of and maintaining the robots.
Are we bringing back jobs that have a great future?"The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America, it's going to be automated," Lutnick said in an appearance on "Face the Nation" in early April. "And great Americans, the tradecraft of America, is going to fix them, is going to work on them. They're going to be mechanics. There's going to be HVAC specialists. There's going to be electricians."
Not all of these jobs would immediately be able to be automated — if people are putting screws into iPhones in China instead of robots now, it's for a reason. And of the nonautomated, robot-nurse jobs, it's not clear how many jobs that would amount to, whether workers will be trained for them, or whether anyone will even want them.
"It would necessitate a real reshuffling in terms of the labor market, rebuilding the workforce and bridging some of the gap in terms of skills in the labor market, and also addressing some of the workforce shortages because the manufacturing sector in the US is already facing a labor shortage," Lydia Boussour, a senior economist at EY, said.
All the robot talk pretty quickly leads to the big question that's keeping a lot of workers across various sectors up at night: Just how close are we to AI taking that job, too? Automation has hit manufacturing jobs harder and more vividly than any other sector, and political and business leaders talk pretty openly about their aspirations along those lines. It seems as if any heavy industrial job that Trump manages to bring back may just be on borrowed time anyway.
"Are we bringing back jobs that have a great future?" Grabow said.
Trump and his allies aren't wrong to suggest that America could stand to take a look at its manufacturing capabilities and approach to trade. William Boone Bonvillian, a lecturer at MIT and a senior advisor to its initiative on new manufacturing, said that America has both national security and economic reasons to try to bring some types of manufacturing back to our shores. We want to be able to make the things we really need, such as weapons, here. And when we develop things here but don't produce them Stateside, we don't innovate on the production end as much as we could or should. "That manufacturing is a very creative stage," he said, and one the US is missing out on.
Bonvillian said there are other upsides for the country's broader job market: Manufacturing jobs tend to create more indirect jobs than service jobs and are cleaner and less physically demanding than they once were. If technology makes manufacturing more efficient and, therefore, businesses more profitable, he said, that should be a good deal for everyone.
"If you can increase the productivity for a company, that creates a real gain, you can do more with less, right?" he said. "So that's a real gain, and therefore, you can raise wages."
Americans aren't wrong to feel some level of nostalgia for a different economic era.Policymakers on both sides of the aisle, including Trump's Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, have taken an interest in industrial policy, trade protectionism, and shoring up American manufacturing. It's just not clear what this tariff regime is doing in terms of orienting the economy or moving people into jobs that are wanted or needed.
"If what you were trying to do was strengthen certain industries in the United States that could be a source of strong middle-class jobs, you would have had a much more targeted, well-thought-out set of tariffs," Stevenson said.
And some of the jobs in the US that need to be made attractive and filled aren't the masculine-coded, manufacturing-focused ones of the mid-20th century. In the more immediate future, as baby boomers age and the labor force shrinks, there's a pressing need for nurses, nurse practitioners, and home health aides. We don't urgently need more people working in factories making the cheap baubles we're importing from China; we need them working to take care of other human beings.
"A real wage strategy would be one to encourage more men to take up some of the female-coded jobs and make them better jobs, unionize them or have standards and regulations," Bevins said.
Americans aren't wrong to feel some level of nostalgia for a different economic era, to view with rose-colored glasses a past with a stronger domestic manufacturing base. And the idea of it does sound kind of nice: You get a job at General Motors out of high school, put in your 30 years, and retire with your pension, just like your dad and grandfather did. But those types of setups are increasingly out of reach, and they're going to be tough to claw back. And even if those jobs do become available, just how happy was your grandpa at work in the first place? If he'd had the choice, he might have opted out, too, just as most Americans say they would now.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
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