Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/opinion/trump-tariff-manufacturing-jobs-industrial.html

https://archive.ph/C2ox2

Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back
June 6, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
By Steven Rattner

For more than 60 years, my family owned a small paint factory in Long Island City, Queens, in the shadow of the neon Pepsi-Cola sign just across the East River from Manhattan. That factory and the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant are long gone — two of the hundreds of industrial facilities that once existed throughout the city.

What has replaced some of them are gleaming towers of condominiums, many with seven-figure price tags. Trendy restaurants have supplanted blue-collar diners. In a few decades, New York’s industrial base was extinguished, yet today, the city has never been more populous or more prosperous, a winner in the process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”

President Trump — who is persisting with his incoherent effort to increase American manufacturing — shows little sign of grasping this key concept. Just as New York prospered as a postindustrial economy, so can the United States flourish without attempting a wholesale rebuilding of lost industrial prowess.

I understand that the relaxation of trade barriers, particularly since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, helped accelerate the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. In retrospect, we should have been less lackadaisical about the loss of an estimated one million manufacturing jobs to China in the 2000s. At a minimum, we should have done more to help displaced workers adjust.

...

[travelingthrulife]

1. Well, Mitt Romney had money to make...

Vulture capitalists broke down those companies and sold them off internationally.

[Scrivener7]

2. Hey, neighbor! My family had an HVAC company

on Long Island City through the early 90s.

A couple of years ago I was at a conference in Queens Plaza and walked over during the lunch break to see who was in the old building. It was gone and a bougie hotel was in its place. Cried like a baby.

[Johnny2X2X]

3. I would argue that we don't really want them back

The idea we're ever going to get factory jobs back that have pensions, wages above $30 an hour, with great healthcare, and other benefits is silly. The manufacturing that exists now is low paying and few people want to do it. Few people want to do hard labor for $15 an hour with almost no benefits. They're trying to bring jobs back that literally don't exist anymore.

You were always going to need an education and/or skills to be in the middle class going forward. We've been telling people that for 50 years now.

The limited number of manufacturing jobs we would want back are higher skilled ones, like the ones Joe Biden brought back with his CHIPS act.

This romanticized idea that we're ever going to go back to a time when small town folks will be able to graduate high school and head down to the stamping plant or steel mill to work next to their parents and uncles for 40 years is silly now.

[Mopar151]

4. A stamping plant, or a steel mill, is not gonna be the same as 1946!

Much more technology and automation, better processes. Gonna need robotics techs, industrial electricians, tool maker machinists.

We're not gonna out-cheap Pakistan!

[hatrack]

5. So says the private equity investor . . .

And he can get away with saying it because there are lots of condos in his old neighborhood? I'm sure that's nice for his old neighborhood. However, " . . . so can the United States flourish"? Your old neighborhood is only so big, you parasitic twat.

I suggest this smug fuck get out of his penthouse apartment and corner office and visit the Dollar General in St. Francis, KS - the only approximation of a grocery store for 35 miles.

He could talk with grocery store customers in Des Moines taking out loans from Klarna to shop, or interact with customers at a car dealership in Phoenix, trying to find anything at all in the way of a reasonably low-mileage used car for less than $25,000.

Maybe he could talk to residents of Waterville, ME, where the hospital just closed, and they're hiring extra EMTs for the extra 30 minutes to Augusta.

But that will never happen. Unlike serial killers, private equity executives never return to the scene of the crimes.

[onethatcares]

6. "Money doesn't talk

it screams" Bob Dylan.

as said upthread, we can never out cheap Pakistan and the powers that be don't give a rat's ass as long as they can turn a profit.

My dad said NAFTA stood for Not a f...ing thing American" . Funny how he was right.