The Work of Reindustrialization

Factory gigs for thee, not for me

There is a fine bedtime story about manufacturing in America we cannot stop telling. It is a simple, plain story: making things is good, and we should make more things. Manufacturing jobs left, and we want them back. The story is so simple that great masses of the American people believe it without question. 80 percent of Americans polled by the Cato Institute¹ agree that "America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing." But when asked if they themselves would be better off working in a factory, only 25 percent agree. The remaining 73 percent would rather not, please and thank you very much.

Like a medicine man’s admixture of dust and perfume, these poll results leave us fascinated and uncertain. We see a longing for prosperity, combined with a personal reluctance to chase that prosperity in a loud, clanging workshop. This looks like a contradiction and — if we are honest — it is a contradiction. But it is a contradiction that reveals something about us as a society, just as the old Hermann Rorschach tests supposedly reveal in a few spattered droplets more about our inner landscapes than a hundred pages of well-reasoned biography could.

Consider that 2024 Cato Institute survey on trade and globalization from which those numbers were derived. It is the sort of contradiction that our politicians and pundits usually ignore, because to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge the vast gulf between what Americans say they want for their country and what they want for themselves. It would acknowledge that something peculiar has happened to the American mind.

On one side, champions of free trade wave these figures around, saying, "Ha! Look at these folks. They're forever praising the nostalgia of big industries, but they won't do the work." On the other side, the pro-manufacturing voices crow, "25 percent — that is more than the number who actually labor in a factory or sit at a workbench. Imagine the possibilities!" Each side claims vindication. Meanwhile, the public — so frequently labeled a monolith — continues to reveal its ambiguity, its certain je ne sais quoi.

When a pollster asks whether "America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing," we imagine a shining scenario: lines of humming factories, households at ease, and neighbors supporting one another. It's an idyllic picture, akin to the old scenes on lunchboxes from the 1950s — which, as so many have noted, was hardly a paradise for anyone. In that gauzy daydream, the boss hands out pay envelopes brimming with real purchasing power. The assembly lines run on discipline and skill. Health benefits are stable, lunches are predictable, and the entire town is anchored to its steel mill or automobile plant.

1915 Crisco advertisement touting “pure food from a clean factory”

When I was a boy, there were still factories and coal mines that supported my Southwestern Pennsylvnaia town. I remember them not because I longed to work in them — my grandfathers, stepfather, uncles, and many cousins all did — but because they were simply places where a great many people went each day. The men who worked in those factories did not talk about manufacturing as some abstract good. They talked about their paychecks, their hours, the difficulty of the work, the toll it took on their bodies. Some of them were proud of what they made; others were not. Some had followed their fathers into the glass factory or mine; others had taken the jobs because there was nothing else; one uncle famously quit the fast track toward a position as a school principal because he hated students and loved everything about the process of mining coal. Even he, I think, would not have answered a poll question about industrial labor with the abstract enthusiasm of that 80%.

It’s the second question that really pierces this perfect bubble. "Would I, personally, be better off if I worked in a factory?" The poll tells us 73% of Americans say, "No," with just 25% saying, "Yes." The old Norman Rockwell "Blacksmith Boy" painting in our minds vanishes, replaced by the actual smell of chemicals and the reality of shift work.

Norman Rockwell, “Blacksmith Boy” (1940)

The factories and mills in my town are gone now, and Mine 84 closed in 2010.² They were not replaced by other factories, mills, or mines. They were replaced by nothing at all, or by strip malls that are now themselves mostly abandoned, or by storage units. And when rabble-rousing politicians come to town and say they want to bring manufacturing back, Washington County’s crowd of dead-red diehards applauds.

But if you ask those same people in the crowd whether they want to work in a factory, or whether they want their children to work in a factory, I suspect that most will say no. It is someone else who should work in these hypothetical new factories, someone nameless and faceless and probably living somewhere else. It is the country that needs manufacturing, not any particular person in it.

In the old Breton lais, the knight declared that lady’s rose garden was lovely — but, oh dear, someone else must be doing the weeding. Here, we detect a similar attitude. We want a rebirth of American industry, but we don't want to wear the hairnet or endure the forklift beep like the 996 Chinese can.³ We want economic might, but we also want an unblemished schedule. We champion the return of the "good old days" for the neighbor's sake, so long as that neighbor does the welding and heavy lifting.

This is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is a kind of confusion, a displacement of desire. The American who wants manufacturing jobs to return but does not want one for himself is not necessarily a hypocrite. He is a man who has been told a story about what makes a nation great, what makes an economy strong. He has absorbed this story, but he has also absorbed another story, a more personal one, about what makes a life good, what makes work worthwhile.⁴ The two stories do not quite fit together, and neither makes much sense.

What stands out most in these numbers is not the contradiction itself — most poll results contain contradictions — but the frankness with which Americans, when asked, will readily proclaim one stance in the abstract and its opposite in the particular. That mismatch between the big picture and the personal reality is the messy stuff of our democracy. Confusion has always been a staple of the American conversation. We want to feed the hungry, but we resent picking up the tab. We hail Social Security as a "third rail," but we balk at subsidizing the "bum kid next door." We protest high unemployment, then object to undocumented immigrants "stealing jobs," even though many of those agricultural and hospitality jobs remain vacant without them.

The first story, the one about manufacturing and national greatness, is in many ways a story about the past. It is a story about a time when America made things, and when the men who made those things could support families on a single income. It is a just-so story about a kind of economic security and social stability that seems to have vanished. It is a nostalgic story, and like most nostalgic stories, it elides the more complicated truths of the past.

We are told that the future belongs to apps that further financialize and "gigify" human experience, yet based posters try to drum up excitement for reopening the cheap toaster factories. Perhaps the hum and clang of old machinery speaks more directly to something in us — an abiding sense that real manufacturing confers dignity on a civilization. The old union halls once gave structure to entire communities. And so we conjure that memory, even as we prefer personally to stay well clear of those environments.

The factories of the mid-twentieth century, the ones that feature in this national story, were not always good places to work. They were often dangerous, dirty, and monotonous. The workers in those factories fought bitter battles with management for decent wages and conditions. The prosperity they eventually achieved was hard-won and, as it turned out, temporary.⁵

The second story, the one about good work and a good life, is a story about the present and the future. It is a story in which manufacturing jobs are seen as they often truly are: repetitive, physically demanding, vulnerable to automation and offshoring. It is a story in which better jobs involve creativity, autonomy, comfortable conditions, and good pay. It is a story in which the best future for one's children is not in a factory but in an office, a laboratory, a studio, or a classroom.

We suspect the job might pay well, but we also hear rumors that so-called "good jobs" aren't so idyllic. In many places, a manufacturer or processing plant can require hours spent on your feet, wearing heavy masks, or toiling at repetitive tasks for wages that, though possibly higher than retail, might not feel like the wages of our grandparents' generation. The factory floor in 2025 could be as automated as an Amazon warehouse facility, with fewer breaks and more cameras. A pollster's question conjures illusions of safer times, but the next question shatters them.

Both stories contain truths and omissions. The first story is right that industrial production creates certain kinds of economic value and stability that Ubering the $50 pad thai in a Prius struggles to match. The second story is right that many manufacturing jobs are difficult, dangerous, or precarious in ways that make them less desirable than other forms of work.⁶

The apparent contradiction doesn't mean we must scold or laugh at one another. Instead, it offers insight into the ways everyday people talk about policy. A poll might ask, "Should we build more factories in America?" 80% say yes. But the question conceals many details. Are these factories to be built in a faraway region so that we can have cheaper goods but not the local noise or the air pollution? Should the factories rely on foreign-born labor — some of it undocumented — to keep costs down? If we say yes to more factories, we rarely say yes to the local consequences.

But there is a third story to be told, one that is largely absent from our public discourse. This is a story about how the conditions of manufacturing work are social and political choices, not inevitable facts of nature. It is a story about how factories in Germany and Japan can be clean, safe, and well-paid workplaces, with skilled workers who enjoy high status and good benefits.⁷ It is a story about how the degradation of manufacturing work in America was and is a choice made by those with power, not an inevitable development.

At times, a certain cynic or jester among us suggests a monstrous compromise: Let those undocumented immigrants live in gated factory dormitories where they work for sub-minimum wages to help us beat China at the game of global commerce. This is the kind of half-joke that would poll better than we suspect, especially in an atmosphere of fear over losing more ground to foreign competition and more general concerns about immigration. We occasionally see such proposals floated in comment sections, not always in jest. It's the old impetus to "build a comfortable walled city," where the major cost of cheap goods is quietly borne by invisible laborers.

But perhaps the circle can be squared: Americans might well want more manufacturing jobs and want those jobs for themselves or their children — if those jobs were different from what they imagine manufacturing jobs to be. But this third story is complicated and challenging. It requires us to think about power and politics, about capital and labor, about how economic value is created and who captures it. It does not fit neatly into the simple narratives of national greatness or personal advancement. It does not work as a campaign slogan or a television sound bite. It would not be easy to implement, certainly not in a single presidential term.⁸ And so it goes untold.

Manufacturing left many American regions decades ago. The illusions about its heroic return ignore the unstoppable shift to automation, global supply chains, and certain forms of precarious labor. We can wave banners all we like about "bringing back manufacturing," but the convenience of technology and a global marketplace cannot be willed away. Factories can indeed return, and some are returning, but they cost vast sums to plan, take ages to construct, and bring forth new styles of work that our reserve army of untrained, undereducated, morbidly obese (see f.n. 5, infra) laborers may struggle with: advanced robotics, 3D printing, and a smaller workforce overseeing mechanical processes. They do not resemble the old mills or the old union halls; they do not require the muscle of ten thousand men carrying molten steel.

Some could respond that the 25% figure — those who say they "would be better off" in a factory — at least shows an opportunity for tenfold growth in current factory employment. They see potential, or perhaps desperation, in that quarter of the population. It's possible that if wages rose enough, or if the work offered some sense of security and pride, many more people would jump onto those lines. But what conditions might spark that jump? Would Americans need hazard pay, or flexible shifts, or a guarantee of healthcare to match older paternalistic systems? Could goods produced under such circumstances even sell within a fully autarkic economy?

Pierre Bourdieu observed that polling tries to create something called "public opinion" by counting the fleeting and shallow answers people give in an isolated moment and then reifying those responses. We do have sentiments, fears, and passing convictions, but we lack the daily unity or close communal ties that once existed in smaller societies. The individual who checks "yes" on the poll's question about manufacturing might have an entire range of half-formed thoughts, fleeting images, and contradictory impulses. Yet the pollster has no time or space to measure these. Their form is, "sic et non," and then on to the next question.

In the absence of such a coherent story, we are left with nostalgia for a past that never quite existed and aspirations for a future that we cannot afford or articulate. We are left with a desire for manufacturing that is always located elsewhere, in someone else's town, someone else's career, someone else's life. We are left, in short, with a paradox: most wanting more factories for the country, but most also not wanting factory jobs for themselves.

The resolution of this will not come from more polling or more political promises. It will come, if it comes at all (and I suspect that it, like Godot, ain’t coming), from a more come-to-Jesus conversation about what kind of work we value, what kind of economy we want, and what kind of future we envision — for the country and for ourselves.⁹ Until then, we are doomed to remain a nation daydreaming of phantom factories in which we earnestly hope we never have to work.

1. Consider the source, but numbers are numbers.

2. My stepfather retired at the same time that it closed.

3. Interestingly, outside of a post-WW2 blip when the rest of the world rebuilt (or built) its physical plant and our industrial leaders gleefully began outsourcing production to said rebuilding states, the country never produced on a scale like China today. That said, manufacturing occupied a steady share of the labor force until 1979, when…the wolf finally came (I highly recommend Hoerr’s excellent book).

Also, in the course of my “day job,” I worked on a short white paper about advanced manufacturing that warrants a look-see: “As these structural changes occurred, economists coalesced around three arguments to explain why manufacturing was in decline. But, as MIT professor William Bonvillian explains in his book Advanced Manufacturing, none of these arguments proved to be true. The first argument is that the decline of American manufacturing was an inevitable symptom of emerging economies entering global markets with cheap labor. Of course, emerging economies did enter the global market with cheap labor. Yet, in Germany — where 20% of its workforce is employed in manufacturing — and its wages are over 60% higher than in the United States — they run a major trade surplus in manufactured goods. The second argument is that it resulted from our economy reaching a point of post-industrial maturity where services would take over our gross domestic product. America built a trade surplus in services, which has grown as a part of our GDP. But, the manufacturing trade deficit has not been replaced by this surplus — far from it. America's trade deficit in manufactured goods increased from $25 billion in 1980 to $922 billion in 2020. Meanwhile, the surplus in our services has only increased from $6 billion to $245 billion over the same period.”

What I couldn’t say there, but can say here, is that the American workforce is very different than, e.g., the German workforce (for many reasons, most of which cannot be resolved, much less stated in polite company).

4. Public education propaganda about the value of reading, writing, and arithmetic? Perhaps, but Americans aren’t all that great at any of those three, at least not in the global context.

5. Read the Hoerr book linked in f.n. 3, supra.

6. Also, as various memes have joked, a vast swath of the American workforce may simply be too obese (40-43% of all adults) to do much “stand-up” work.

7. See f.n. 3, supra.

8. For example: “Another nail in this coffin, according to Berger, is the fact that it wasn’t just investment into creating innovative education that was lacking, it was investment into technology in general. She explains that in her opinion this makes the skills gap a moot point. “[A lot of US manufacturers] are not looking for skills, because they themselves have plants with very old equipment,” says Berger. “What they have to be able to do is teach people how to use their old equipment. They don’t have robots or things like 3D printing. They need somebody to come in and learn by ‘watching Joe’ (that is looking over the shoulder of some experienced worker). So I think we need to be focusing on technology acquisition by these firms.””

9. Good luck with that, fam! When is the last time you had so much as an honest conversation with your significant other about the household chores?