I don’t think these people exist. What I mean is, unemployment is 4%, and has been that low for the last 3 years. It’s a stupidly low number, historically low, as low as it was when the US was the only large industrialized nation that wasn’t bombed to shit in WWII.
There aren’t millions of recently laid off manufacturing workers eagerly waiting for factories to be built. They already have jobs. If the US built factories for a couple million workers, we would immediately have a workforce shortage, and businesses all over would have trouble running their businesses.
This is the most baffling part of the “bring manufacturing back” message. It’s not 1975, we’re not banging on 8% unemployment with a bunch of the midwest reeling after auto and steel industry layoffs. We also are the world’s second biggest manufacturer of goods already, behind a country that has 4x our population.
I’ve been in factories in Canada, a rich first world country, that made clothing. More complex and specialized clothing than you’d import from Cambodia, but it’s cutting and sewing. They’re not bad places to work. It’s good employment. There isn’t anything degrading or wrong about making clothes.
The reason this sort of work is 98% offshored is not that the work is bad or that you couldn’t find people to do it. That is totally wrong, and it’s not why we trade with other countries. It’s sent overseas because of comparative advantage; we absolutely, 100 percent could make clothing in the USA or Canada or wherever, but our time is better spent making other things. We are COMPARATIVELY better at making airplanes, software, and extruded aluminum. The opportunity cost of making clothing here is higher than it is in other countries. That’s all there is to it.
International trade should be beneficial to all parties involved. This promotes global cooperation and mutual economic growth, and that in turn improves political relationships and reduces military tensions. The Trump mentality doesn’t think that way. The Trump mentality thinks we have to “win” by taking advantage of the people we trade with by “coming out on top”. As president, he wants to continue what he’s always done in the business world, crush everyone around him. This is a very dangerous man.
Unemployment figures only include people actually looking for work. An additional 11% of 25-54 year old men in the US are ‘economically inactive’, which has risen from 6% in 1980 (I chose men because women have been entering the workforce in larger numbers over the same time.) AIUI, a relatively high number of people who lost their jobs when factories closed, especially older people, ended up on long term disability benefits. Others eventually found other jobs, but they may not be as good: lower pay, irregular hours, no benefits, no opportunity for advancement, etc.
It would be a problem for restaurants, Walmart and Uber if their wait staff, cashiers, and drivers found better jobs, but I doubt the workers involved would care.
(And as @Smapti says, manufacturing jobs won’t be coming back to the US, at least not as a result of these tariffs.)
I was speaking hypothetically, @LSLGuy. I know even the pre-Trump US government was not some paragon of altruism or effectiveness. I daresay that in fact a lot of countries offshored certain manufacturing as a cynical means of improving their greenhouse gas emissions figures, despite the fact this did not meaningfully reduce total emissions and may even have increased them
Besides which, there is possibly some country somewhere that has tariffs on certain American products for this reason - or more likely has ‘non-tariff barriers’, like banning products that don’t meet stringent safety criteria.
And this is true, too:
Those industries aren’t employing (all) the people who were working in the clothing and other closed factories, though. So why can’t the US manufacture both? What’s the actual opportunity cost?
An “equation” would require math.
Nobody is doing any math.
But, I’ll do some- the 125% tariffs on Chinese exports means that we need to charge our customers $15,000 over and above our quoted price for a current order.
To be honest, I think some of these “economically inactive” people are not really employable; they’re not capable of following directions, self starting, etc. If they’re still unemployed years after the factories closed, surely they should have been able to find something else? Now it may be that I’m being completely unfair to them; if you live in a dying Rust Belt city in Ohio for instance, there may not be many other options once the big factory in town closed.
If they formerly had factory jobs, they must have been employable in some circumstances. Unwillingness to leave their Rust Belt city probably is the main reason, and most genuinely have health issues that render them less employable; even if they would be capable of some jobs, that doesn’t mean those jobs are available, or that there aren’t better candidates competing for them.
Levels of economic inactivity did drop during the recent period of high employment, so at least some of this group are able to work if demand is high enough.
Another factor; if you last worked in a factory ten or twenty years ago, you may not be capable of the highly automated and computer-based factory work of today.
I don’t think it’s restricted to factory work. Anyone who leaves the workforce for whatever reason will likely find that their skills have stagnated and will find it more and more difficult to get a job as time goes on.
This includes soft skills like the habit of getting up every day ready and able to work, getting along with co-workers, etc.
I spend a LOT of my time in factories. The notion they’re all like a scene in a sci fi movie is just not true. Automation and computerization is common, but they’re factories, and you don’t need to be the kid from “War Games” to work in one.
Even dirtier, more traditional factories struggle sometimes to find labor, but that’s because there days we lack skilled trades - welders, machinists, millwrights, and the like, NOT computer experts - and people willing to work in factories. Manufacturing businesses need people all the time and they’re happy to train.
If you wanna work in a factory, and you’re willing to show up on time and work hard, I can find you a job in a week.
If you’ve got those skills (welding, machining, millwright, etc), presumably you’re not among the long-term unemployed but instead quickly moved to a lucrative position elsewhere.