Factory work is overrated. Here are the jobs of the future

TRUMPIAN types are unanimous: America needs factories. The president describes how workers have “watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream”. Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, says that tariffs will “fill up all of the half-empty factories”. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, offers the most cartoonish pitch of all: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones – that kind of thing is going to come to America.”

For years, politicians and some economists have linked manufacturing’s long decline to stagnant wages, hollowed-out towns and even the opioid crisis. In the 2000s alone America shed nearly six million factory jobs. Such work often offered high-school leavers a route to a stable, quietly prosperous life. It sustained entire cities, earning Pittsburgh the moniker “Steel City” and Akron that of “Rubber Capital of the World”. Little surprise, then, that politicians across the spectrum want the jobs back. Indeed, president Joe Biden shared the same dream as his successor, even if he hoped to achieve it by different means. “Where the hell is it written”, he asked, “that we’re not going to be the manufacturing capital of the world again?”

Yet there is a problem: even if industry returns, the old jobs will not. Manufacturing produces more than in the past with fewer hands – a transformation much like that undergone by agriculture. Accessible, middle-class work of the sort that once drew crowds to the factory gates in America’s Fordist heyday has all but vanished. According to our analysis, the most similar work to the manufacturing jobs of the 1970s is not to be found in factories, which are now automated and capital-intensive, but in employment as an electrician, mechanic or police officer. All offer decent wages to those lacking a degree.