Cnn
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In 1970, more than a quarter of American workers occupied jobs in the manufacturing sector. Today is only about 8%.
The Trump administration indicates that radical prices will reverse this drop of several decades. But a vision of factory cities and invigorated assembly chains that defined America 50 years ago can be out of step with the realities of 2025.
One of the architects of the tariff plan, the main advisor of the White House, Peter Navarro, said that the “end of the game” of the plan is “to fill all the half -empty factories which now operate at low capacity around Detroit and the Grand Midwest region”.
However, America is very different now compared to the glory days of the rust belt five decades ago, when millions of workers were employed to perform specific tasks along the mounting lines. Today, at a time of automation and artificial intelligence, factory floors are increasingly filled with robots doing this work instead. This means that new and reopened American factories will require fewer workers with more specialized skills.
“The work has changed a lot, and yes, there has been a dynamic change in the number of workers who are necessary there,” said Carolyn Lee, executive director of the Manufacturer Institute, affiliated with the development and education of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM).
This means that the president’s pricing policies, which have been welcomed by some in the business world and have disrupted the world’s stock markets, can only be one effort to inaugurate the rebirth of the manufacturing that the Trump administration hopes. If the prices successfully push companies to extend their manufacturing capacities in the United States, experts say that the challenge will consist in training Americans to work in modern manufacturing roles – and to interest them to do so.
The history of the long and slow loss of manufacturing jobs has been extinguished in the United States. During the decades that followed the Second World War, the United States led the world in manufacturing. But in the past 50 years, these jobs have widely evolved abroad, and many American factories have closed or blocked, devastating the economic prospects of the country’s rust belt.
Trump has long done his words against the loss of American manufacturing prowess, and last week, he used it both as a backdrop and a rallying cry when Announce the most extensive tariff package for at least a century: a reference rate of 10% applied in all countries, with even higher rates for the 60 countries that Trump administration has deemed the “worst offenders”.
“American steel workers, car workers, farmers and qualified craftsmen … They watched foreign leaders in anxiety stole our jobs, foreign cheaters ransacked our factories,” Trump said during the announcement of the Garden Rose of the White House last week.
It is always to be discussed whether free trade is mainly to blame for the drop in American manufacturing, however, because several studies have stressed automation resulting in more job losses than outsourcing.
Despite this, the American manufacturing sector had been on a modest rebound before the announcement of Trump’s price. Several companies – including Nvidia, Apple and Stellantis – have announced investments in American manufacturing in recent months, for which the White House has taken the credit.
But with the unemployment rate of 4.2%, there are more open manufacturers than Americans wishing to fill them.
In February 2025, there were 482,000 manufacturing job offers, according to the latest job openings and turnover survey. In a report of last year, the Manufacturer and Deloitte Institute estimated that there would be 1.9 million jobs not filled in manufacturing by 2033.
Investments in American manufacturing would probably push the number of not fulfilled jobs.
Many modern manufacturing works will require knowledge of software, data analysis and coding, said Lee. Other positions will require workers who can repair robots in a factory floor. Although many of these jobs do not require a university degree, they require certifications and training, she added.
“There is not a single kind of manufacturing job, but what is common to each of these jobs is that they will need skills,” said Lee. “The majority of jobs in the sector are not levels of entry level which have no competence.”
Olaf Groth, who teaches the future of the world economy at the Haas School of Business from the University of California in Berkeley, said that he agreed with efforts to reshape manufacturing, but they should be associated with efforts to ensure that American workers are prepared for work.
“The skills that American workers have have been mistreated for manufacturing right now,” said Groth. “What we have to do is raise the majority of American work in the highly qualified qualified environment.”
Meanwhile, criticism say that prices can affect many workers they claim to protect. Higher prices often translate into higher prices, which often hit low -income families.
“In the end, prices are a tax on imports,” read a February post by JPMorgan. “The tax impact almost always falls under national sellers and consumers, not foreign producers.”
When Trump announced prices on $ 34 billion in imports from China during his first mandate in 2018, Ravin Gandhi, then GMM CEO Non-Stick Coating, a non-stick supplier for cooking utensils, was a vocal opponent of politics, arguing that prices would make its products more expensive for American consumers.
Gandhi left his role in GMM last year to work in venture capital investment. Since then, his opinion on the prices has evolved. He now supports the president’s efforts to bring manufacturing to the United States through prices.
Gandhi said there was a theme he had heard from friends and colleagues: “robots and automation”.
“I have so many friends who make entrepreneurs, and they delight cost savings they see as they start to automate,” he added. “These are machines. They don’t need breaks. They don’t need Christmas.”
Gandhi said he had already seen the automation replacing some of GMM’s manufacturing jobs before leaving his CEO post, but it remains optimistic that the new technology will inaugurate new jobs for American workers.
“I am techno-optimist. I believe that in five years, there will be large job bands that do not exist today that you cannot even understand,” he said.
This is a question that extends beyond the rust belt. Artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt a large number of American industries, not just manufacturing, and many experts reflect on the types of jobs necessary in the midst of a technological upheaval. A survey of the World Economic Forum in January revealed that 41% of employers in all industries intend to reduce their workforce while AI automatizes certain tasks.
“We must define what are the impacts of industrial AI and which will be these impacts on workers and skills,” said Lee of the Manufacturing Institute. “In the absence of knowledge, I think there is a lot of fear and concern. We must be able to help train people in the skills they will need. ”
