Trump is pushing for the return of ‘masculine’ manufacturing jobs. The problem is, men simply don’t want them.

UNITED STATES – President Donald Trump’s vision of reviving the American manufacturing industry harks back to the 1950s—an era when well‑paid, brawny factory work sat at the heart of the U.S. economy. 

The promise: if imported goods get pricier, companies will reopen domestic plants and restore what Trump’s allies onFox Newshave hailed as the “ultimate testosterone boost” for American labor. 

Polls show voters like the idea in theory. An AugustCato surveyfound 80 percent of Americans believe the country would be stronger if more people worked in manufacturing. Yet only a quarter said they would personally take a factory job. 

That gap between nostalgia and reality is the central flaw economists see in Trump’s pitch: today’s workers—male or female—simply aren’t keen to swap air‑conditioned offices, service‑sector flexibility, or even a decent car‑wash gig for the demands of an assembly line. 

Kyle Handley, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, tellsBusiness Insiderthat globalization is only part of the manufacturing story. Automation and rising education levels mean “people have gravitated toward” service jobs that feel safer, cleaner, and more stable than factory floors. 

Even if tariffs did lure plants back, industry faces a chronic labor shortage. A 2024reportby Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute estimates that of 3.8 million positions expected to open by 2033, roughly half could go unfilled because of an aging workforce, restrictive immigration policies, and a skills mismatch. 

Evidence of wage stagnation isn’t helping recruitment.Bureau of Labor Statistics datashow average earnings for production workers now trail the national average, eroding the once‑clear pay premium that drew generations of Americans to the line. 

Union decline compounds the issue. “The reason we thought those were good jobs back in the day is they were unionized,” says Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. “Bring back a bunch of non‑union manufacturing jobs and it won’t happen”. 

Economist Colin Grabow of the Cato Institute adds that the country can’t even fill today’s factory openings, making talk of a boom feel detached from labor‑market math. 

Trump’s tariff cheerleaders also brush aside the role of robots. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has openly said reshored factories will be heavily automated—humans will be needed mainly to service the machines. 

That vision may create specialized maintenance jobs, but not the millions of repetitive, physically demanding roles voters imagine. 

Lydia Boussour, senior economist at EY, warns it would take “a real reshuffling” of training pipelines and immigration policy to staff even the modest number of positions automation leaves behind. 

Critics don’t deny that a sturdier industrial base has strategic value. MIT manufacturing expert William Bonvillian argues the U.S. should be able to build critical goods—especially defense hardware—onshore and capture the innovation that happens during production. 

But Betsey Stevenson, a former White House economist now at the University of Michigan, contends that a broad tariff wall is the wrong tool. A targeted mix of subsidies, training incentives, and pro‑union labor policy would do more to create “strong middle‑class jobs” than blanket levies that raise consumer prices while encouraging companies to automate faster. 

Meanwhile, sectors screaming for workers—nursing, elder‑care, teaching—are traditionally “feminine” and often pay less than the factory jobs of old. Bivens suggests a genuine wage strategy would encourage men to enter these growing fields and make them better‑paid, partly by restoring collective‑bargaining muscle. 

Americans’ yearning for the mid‑century manufacturing dream is understandable: a single income that could buy a house, raise kids, and guarantee a pension. But as Grabow notes, “that’s just not the world we live in anymore.” Technological change, global supply chains, and shifting career aspirations mean the assembly‑line path to middle‑class security is vanishing—and tariffs can’t rewind that clock. 

Trump’s trade rhetoric taps into a powerful nostalgia for heavy‑industry masculinity, yet the numbers suggest few Americans are ready to trade laptops for lathes. Without a broader rethink of wages, unions, and training, tariffs alone risk producing costlier imports, faster robots—and still‑empty factory floors.