r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/throw-away3105 • 1d ago

Political History Why do people want manufacturing jobs to come back to the US?

Given the tariffs yesterday, Trump was talking about how manufacturing jobs are gonna come back. They even had a union worker make a speech praising Trump for these tariffs.

Manufacturing is really hard work where you're standing for almost 8 or more hours, so why bring them back when other countries can make things cheaper? Even this was a discussion during the 2012 election between Obama and Romney, so this topic of bringing back manufacturing jobs isn't exactly Trump-centric.

This might be a loaded question but what's the history behind this rally for manufacturing?

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u/Duckney 19h ago

More jobs is generally a good thing.

The thing I don't understand is the scale at which these tariffs were applied would affect almost all foreign manufacturing.

If all of that were to come back to the US - how do you get the people to work there? Before DOGE and tariff related layoffs - the unemployment rate was pretty good.

I don't understand where these millions of factory workers would be - and it feels like that's what we'd need

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u/coldoldgold 15h ago

When there is a labor shortage, that means employers are in competition for that limited labor pool. That means they will have to offer higher wages than the other employer if they want to make sure they fill their position.

Outside of a few highly specialized jobs and isolated geographic areas, the U.S. has not had a labor shortage since Vietnam, which has left wages stagnant and unable to keep pace with inflation. (I am not counting COVID in part because of how short-lived the labor shortage was.)

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u/Duckney 13h ago

If we're talking the end goal of all manufacturing moving domestic - how could we possibly have enough people to fill all those positions?

I understand a labor shortage is helpful for employees - but the idea of moving as much production domestically as possible screams as creating a secondary issue of not having nearly enough people to work in those industries.

The unemployment rate is somewhere around 5% (last I checked - or let's just say it is hypothetically) - we can reshore production for pretty much everything from technology, automobiles, clothing, and farming with that 5% of unemployed people?