In a recent column, Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley made some good points and provided some supporting statistics on the decreasing percentage of American men who want to work in manufacturing or, for that matter, who want to work at all (“A Good Man for U.S. Manufacturing Is Hard to Find,” April 6, 2025).
I agree with her and make the additional point that many manufacturing operations and jobs are not as high-paying and profitable as commonly believed. My qualifications for saying so include the fact that unlike most Americans, I have extensive firsthand experience in manufacturing (and natural resources).
For example, to help pay for my college degree, I once worked as a laborer in an aluminum fabrication plant, and then in my subsequent business career, was a manager and executive for an international packaged-goods conglomerate, and later, for a diversified company that had eleven business units in manufacturing and natural resources.
Also, on a family note, my 33-year-old son is an engineer for a major defense contractor.
His best friend is an engineer for Intel in the Phoenix suburbs of Chandler and Gilbert. I recently asked the friend if Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was poaching Intel engineers, given that TSMC is building advanced plants in metro Phoenix and that morale has fallen at Intel. He replied that Intel engineers and American engineers in general are reluctant to work for TSMC, because, like other Asian companies, it expects professional employees to work long hours and on weekends.
“Manufacturing” is a catchall category that encompasses widely different kinds of operations requiring widely different skill levels and offering widely different levels of pay. All manufacturing is not created equal, all manufacturing is not high-wage and high-skill, and all manufacturing does not lead to widespread prosperity.
A clean room in an Intel fab, for instance, is quite different from the noise, smoke, fumes, and hazards of the aluminum fabrication plant of my youth, where I met the skill requirement of being able to swing a hammer for eight hours a day. It was the worst job I have ever held, far worse than my stints in high school and college as a union painter, a grocery stock clerk and checker, a sewer construction inspector, a janitor, and a bartender.
Or take a different industry. Take the production of oriented strand boards for home construction. Producing oriented strand boards is quite different from producing circuit boards for computers—as I saw firsthand in my management career.
An OSB plant was a marvel of automation. It had to be, given that the boards were a commodity of high cyclicality and subject to considerable price pressure. Logs would enter at one end of the mammoth plant and finished boards would exit at the other end, with few employees in between.
The circuit board plant was also under considerable price pressure, but the operation wasn’t conducive to much automation. It had rows and rows of low-wage immigrant Vietnamese women manually inserting and soldering electric components on boards pre-printed with circuitry by imported machines.
As I also saw, producing carbon black for the tire industry is quite different from producing Snickers bars in a Mars, Inc. plant. Workers in a carbon black plant in a dreary part of the Texas panhandle were covered in sweat and what looked like furnace soot. Workers in a Snickers plant wore white coveralls in a spotless, temperature-controlled environment.
A small plant producing polymer beads in a depressing town outside of ugly Beaumont, Texas was a low-wage supplier to the auto industry. The plant took polymers produced at a Beaumont petrochemical plant and ran them through extruders to produce a mix of polymer beads for shipment to a company that turned them into bumpers for cars. Operating an extruder all day is not very rewarding, either financially or emotionally.
On the other hand, a Mars pet food plant in Germany was rewarding, once employees became accustomed to the smell of Russian horse meat being cooked and processed. The plant was highly automated and benefited from German-engineered machinery and German engineering know-how.
Even if Trump’s tariff scheme was not inchoate, slapdash, and contradictory—and even if he were willing to forgo the scheme and get other countries to eliminate all tariffs—US manufacturers would still have to compete on labor, especially for tasks that can’t be automated.
That’s easier said than done, as my experience found and as Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley suggested.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.
Isn’t that the whole idea? Take away the necessity of holding a job; take away the necessity to care for a family; take away the necessity to have a home of your own; brainwashed to hate America; believe fake history narratives and FINALLY the government owns your soul completely! And people don’t even know it. If I were physically able to still sling a hammer I’d love to work again. People have no concept of accomplishment anymore. We’ve been rewarding kids with awards for just showing up, instead of knowing what healthy competition is. Will America ever get that American drive and self initiative back? I wonder & pray.
One point not mentioned is the fact that there are quite a few folks that will NOT be engineers, or run a business, and those folks have been forgotten and many ended up on drugs and homeless. We have many in Phoenix that are in their late 20’s to early 40’s. When people have nothing to bring them any sort of pride, and can’t find a job, things spiral out of control. I own a metal fabrication shop and my guys are paid well and have benefits. If and when crap was to ever hit the fan, we can do without paper pushers, and number crunchers but we cannot do without skilled workers.
with all they nay saying aside yes there are people available BUT they will have to take the democraps ideas of not working and getting paid away. There are thousands of jobs available now but the mem and the left keep spouting off that there is NO NEED for the US to be a manufacture center. The pay for not working needs to be adjusted, women need to declare why they have so many kids without fathers. I think if a woman has a kid no dad then yes she gets some aid, has another well just get the same amount and if 3d or more gets nothing more. People will work if there are no incentives for them to sit on their asses. I worked since 14 years old like the author but I knew if I didnt I would not get anything. My dad died when I was 6 months old, mom was denied any help since she had piece of dirt to live on. She worked as an LPN, a cook in a drug store (yes they had fountains then) worked at the county hosp as a cook and she BUILT her home at the same time. Scrap lumber from the WW2 barracks on DMAFB, I helped straighten nails to be reused. People had ambitions back them to succeed, now a days not so much. I worked in my teens as a swamper for a log truck, up and out door at 0400-2000 daily. oil changes, fueling, they had gas, propane, and diesel back then too, repair tires with split rims now that was fun (not). Later in HS the coach was an alderman, he made sure the football players got summer jobs, manual labor to build muscles. We used sythes to cut brass along roadways, axes and wedges to remove tree stumps from sidewalks and sledge hammers to break up the sidewalks and then load the pieces by hand in dump trucks. yess lots of fun. later worked in a factory making folding chairs $1.25/hr because I got .10 extra for nigh shift. Then came home to tucson got luck while at UA to get a job at a gas station $1.35/hr and .05$ for every quart of oil i could sell over 100 cans. Thought I was rich when hired at sears for $2.25 hr as tire installer. Left for the beginning of my army career as a 2LT $225/month. I make more now retired tan I ever did on AD I have worked again as a safety specialist drove school buses and now stay home. So I dont need to hear how they had to work hard, we all did back then and are proud of it, now-a-days they just complain about working in offices and stuff. No do away with govet aide except for required care. Seems a lot of non workers actually have nicer cars than I do!
If it’s labor cost vs labor cost, the author’s point is true. However, there are many other cost factors involved in off shoring.
1) Innovation is stifled. If making staples, innovation not a driver. But with developing products a flexible source integrated with engineering wins the day.
2) Lead time, freight, delays and quality – crap from China is just that, crap. Defective products are a significant added cost.
3) Social costs – for instance, when a US has a plant in Mexico, a Maquiladora, there are labor costs not in our country. For instance the plants provide child care, two free meals, housing and transportation subsidies, all required by the Mexican labor unions which are Communist.
4) Availability of labor – it’s so much the cost but is there an availability of labor. If the process is rudimentary, low cost labor is used but innovation dies. With high tariffs, those products moved to US production but since we don’t have the labor force, we certainly have the engineering force and that’s what drives innovation, efficiency, lower cost and a thriving work force.
Even if Trump’s tariff scheme was not inchoate, slapdash, and contradictory—and even if he were willing to forgo the scheme and get other countries to eliminate all tariffs—US manufacturers would still have to compete on labor, especially for tasks that can’t be automated… are you saying ‘Americans are LAZY’ – I am.
My years – Army – Steel Mine vents Plant – Block Layer labor – Roofer (yes Tucson) – Drilling Rig Hand – Beans & Salads – Busboy steakhouse (great for my dog!) – Lab labor – before 10 years Hospital and now employer of 33 years. JUST DO IT! Keep DOING IT! Nothing to it 🙂
There is really no task that can’t automated. Steve Jobs built a lights out factory in Fremont, CA to build Macs 40 years ago.