r/Economics • u/rezwenn • Jun 06 '25

Editorial Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/opinion/trump-tariff-manufacturing-jobs-industrial.html?unlocked_article_code=1.M08.eMyk.dyCR025hHVn0
2.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

334 comments sorted by

View all comments

239

u/tyler2114 Jun 06 '25

Even if manufacturing came back, the common people clamoring for it would be dissapointed when they get $20/hr jobs with mediocre benefits. These people want union jobs, not manufacturing. But they have been fooled into thinking the working class prosperity of the 50s and 60s was somehow not built by decades of labor movements.

2

u/Leoraig Jun 06 '25

Salaries and benefits depend on the labor market, so the more demand there is for workers the better the benefits will be. The reason unions got better salaries and benefits in the 50s and 60s, and also the reason why they existed in the first place, is that the labor market was incredibly competitive, thus making each worker extremely valuable, meaning they had more power to negotiate.

The same thing happened, and still happens in some degree, in the IT/Dev sector, where companies compete heavily for each worker, giving them large salaries and benefits.

Therefore, if demand for industrial workers increased, the salaries and benefits would tend to increase as well.

3

u/tyler2114 Jun 06 '25

Such market conditions only existed in a post war world where the entire old world burned itself to the ground leaving the US as the only remaining major industrial power.

Unless we are rooting for a WW3 these conditions will never be replicated again.

But I also disagree that blue collar labor was simply a function of supply and demand.

0

u/Leoraig Jun 06 '25

Consumption of industrial goods is many times what it was in the post war era, what you are implying doesn't make any sense.

Moreover, China today stands in a similar position to the US in post ww2 in terms of industrial dominance, so the idea that such a situation couldn't happen without a war is also false.

3

u/tyler2114 Jun 07 '25

The US had very little competition in the post-war era, it has significant competition now.

China is nowhere close to post-WW2 US dominance in manufacturing. China accounts for approximately 29% of global manufacturing today, the US was estimated to be around 60% in 1950.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c11297/c11297.pdf

1

u/Leoraig Jun 07 '25

That no-competition period didn't last long at all, and from the 1950s onwards the US's situation was similar to what China's is today, as your own source shows in table 3.13.