You Will Work in the Factory and You Will Like It
I am not cut out for the factory life: Sorry to disappoint Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who apparently has big plans for us all.
“You go to the community colleges, and you train people!” he says, before listing two universities—Arizona State University and Grand Canyon University—that are decidedly not community colleges. “It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. You know, this is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Now you should see an auto plant, it’s highly automated but the people, the 4-5,000 people who work there, they are trained to take care of those robotic arms.”
Lutnick seems very enthusiastic about other people and their kids and grandkids laboring in factories for their entire working lives. https://t.co/uykrvpBBRK
— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) April 30, 2025
To me, Lutnick’s vision is sort of the opposite of the American dream. No disrespect to the 13 million Americans who work in manufacturing, or the roughly 2.4 million who work on farms (related labor, in that it’s a category that’s drastically declined over the last century, to the ire of some of the retvrn types), but possibly the best thing about America is the upward mobility that allows many families to, over generations and with hard work, graduate from these more tedious forms of labor. That was my family’s story, at least: My granddad grew up on a farm but was able to leave and go to school and get out of Dodge (almost literally—he is from a town close to Dodge City, Kansas, where the expression originated), providing for his family by moving to Texas and working in the early tech boom, for companies like Motorola and Texas Instruments.
Of course, there are some families for which this isn’t the case. Many people had their factory work dry up and disappear, finding nothing decent in its wake. Between 2000 and 2010, across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, “manufacturing employment dropped by 35 percent in 10 years…eliminating 1.6 million jobs.” Deaths of despair in the affected regions have risen. But the unemployment numbers in the Rust Belt and Midwest manufacturing areas have bounced back a lot in recent years. Also—relevant to Lutnick’s point—the look of American manufacturing has changed a lot over time. “Since 2016, the number of men with Ph.D.s working in manufacturing has risen by 50 percent,” says Zanny Minton-Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist. “Manufacturing is increasingly a high-skill, high-end activity. You shouldn’t assume that more manufacturing jobs means more jobs for male workers of the sort that I think both Donald Trump and President Biden have in mind when they’re talking about bringing good manufacturing jobs back to the United States.” Lutnick appears to be gesturing at this, but he’s going to run into issues of scale—automation-supervising needs far fewer people devoted to it than when humans were doing much more of the granular work. And the vision he’s selling—where future generations have no prospects of moving up the economic ladder—isn’t a very compelling one.
Roman
Article from Reason.com
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