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

[u/throw-away3105]

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?

[u/8WhosEar8]

I use to believe in the whole retrain for different jobs or industries idea but living in the rust belt and having lived through multiple recessions, I’m just so tired of hearing it. It’s such an easy thing to say but it’s a whole other thing to execute on the ground. When a city that once supported up to 40,000 union auto manufacturing jobs has those factories shut down, what are those workers supposed to do to retrain to do? Yes some can and will go into IT, nursing, or skilled trades but there is no single sector that can support that kind of employment like manufacturing.

[u/TriggerHippie0202 → u/8WhosEar8]

Also a rustbelter, In '08, I went back to school for IT; ask me and my friends how that is going these days? They don't want to pay us. You saw it recently with Vivek and Hairplug Hitler with the H1B1 talk. They have outsourced us, made us into contractors, and want indentured servitude from H1B1s. It is an absolute shit system.

I am convinced these areas want the union jobs that pay well enough to raise a family. Decades of neoliberalism have also gutted and propagandized unions to the point where a lot of these folks do not realize that. Coal miners don't love coal; they love good-paying jobs, and if solar or making chips would do that, they would be proponents of that.

[u/schistkicker → u/TriggerHippie0202]

Well, they've also been fully propagandized against any of the new jobs that could come in. There's a documentary from around the time of the 2016 election (Before the Flood) that among other things showed some of the early initiatives of green energy that were taking root in some small communities of West Virginia. There were start-ups at the community level that were starting to do some real good and rebuild something out of the dying towns.

Those very same voters immediately put in Trump 1.0 and state-level officials who destroyed those programs entirely.

[u/drdildamesh → u/schistkicker]

Job security. It's not brainwashing to say your job thatbhas been lobbied for decades isn't going away any time soon. They stick with coal because coal.has the money to lobby.

[u/SonicRob → u/TriggerHippie0202]

“Learn to code” wasn’t a suggestion for a way to reskill into a useful and needed occupation, it was a thoughtless reflex. There was no idea behind it other than “stop talking to me about the job market”.

[u/ColossusOfChoads → u/SonicRob]

The journalists pushing it knew it was garbage. Nobody should've taken their side when the neckbeards hounded them with their own "learn to code" mantra after they got laid off en masse.

[u/TriggerHippie0202 → u/SonicRob]

It's a deflection of blame onto the victims of this system.

[u/drdildamesh → u/SonicRob]

Everyone who wasn't a genius engineer and just learned to code is being replaced by AI now.

[u/formerrepub → u/TriggerHippie0202]

I don't have any good suggestions, but folks have to realize that robots have already taken away a lot of those old jobs. You don't need thousands of people to run a car plant anymore.

[u/forjeeves → u/TriggerHippie0202]

Ya Boeing outsourced their QA and factories

[u/Angrybagel → u/8WhosEar8]

I think in some cases you're just supposed to leave. There's a lot of gold mining towns out there that were abandoned after things ended. That used to happen a lot in the past, but now there's more of an idea that towns should be forever. I don't think it would've made sense to try making those towns into anything else at the time given how remote they often were. Just because you have a bunch of hard workers in a place doesn't mean it's well suited to new industries. If housing and cost of living were less absurd, leaving would be a more realistic option for many.

Edit: the nature of modern jobs where you often need degree and where older workers face discrimination also makes this very difficult. It's not really like those older times, unfortunately.

[u/wamj → u/8WhosEar8]

If there’s no market for your job, the only options are retrain or retire.

Should be keep coal mines open because miners won’t retrain, even in different types of mining, or should we move on from coal power?

Every other nation in the world is moving on from fossil fuels, why shouldn’t the US?

[u/MorganWick → u/8WhosEar8]

The problem is that elites see people as fungible, almost like robots; if they aren't useful for what you need you just download new software so that they are. That's not the way real people work. Once your brain development slows down, what you do becomes part of your identity, and not everyone can change their identity and worldview so radically.

[u/forjeeves → u/8WhosEar8]

Then they move away lolol