The median age of today’s manufacturing workers is relatively high, at 44.3 years.

Allysia Finley writes in the Wall Street Journal about the difficulty of finding workers to fill the manufacturing jobs we have today.

She writes:

President Trump proclaims his tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Good luck finding workers to fill them. A common lament among employers, especially manufacturers, is they can’t find reliable, conscientious workers who can pass a drug test. Single women might commiserate: A good worker, like a good man, can be hard to find these days….

Forty percent of small business owners in March reported job openings they couldn’t fill, with larger shares in construction (56%), transportation (53%) and manufacturing (47%), according to last week’s National Federation of Independent Business survey. The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey of businesses tells a similar story. There are twice as many job openings in manufacturing than in the mid-2000s as a share of employment. Save for during the pandemic, America’s worker shortage is the worst in 50 years.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 482,000 job openings in manufacturing in January. What could be the problem?

Finley explains that the government providing benefits that create disincentives to work, along with technology and, to a very small extent, trade, explains the reduction in jobs in manufacturing. But as she notes, “this generation is sailing into the sunset, and there are many fewer young Americans who want to work in factories.”

She is correct that few young people want to work in manufacturing. Yet, the president is liberating us from prosperity to create jobs that most young people don’t want. I am not saying this because I believe that manufacturing jobs aren’t very good or that they aren’t fairly well-paid jobs with benefits. Because they are, for the most part. In fact, they have these nice features today in no small part because the US specializes in high-value manufacturing production with a lot of automation. I am saying this because you can see it in the data.

The median age of today’s manufacturing workers is relatively high, at 44.3 years, according to my colleague Jack Salmon. It is also quickly rising. Only 8 percent of manufacturing workers are under 25.

Also, surveys show that young people’s preferences for employment are in the service industry, healthcare, and tech in particular. After all, that’s why so many high school graduates choose to go to college. Salmon points to various surveys, including this: “According to one survey of Gen Z respondents by Soter Analytics, only 14 percent of respondents said they might consider a job in manufacturing.”

These preferences, of course, might, to a degree, reflect parental pressures. According to a 2019 Survey, “only 27 percent of parents said they would encourage their children to pursue a career in manufacturing.” In part, this is because, while many factory jobs are high-tech and automated, young people (and their parents) still think of manufacturing work in 20th-century terms. This is the irony of the whole situation since the Trump administration would indeed want to bring back 20th-century style manufacturing jobs — low pay and lower skills. These are precisely the types of jobs that younger people don’t like.

Now, to be fair, when Trump administration officials are honest about what might happen, they do admit that a boom in manufacturing would not bring factory jobs back for those men who have dropped out of the labor force because most of the jobs will be higher skilled or automated.

The reality today is this, as explained by Finley:

The unemployment rate among recent college grads with a sociology degree is 6.7% and their median wage is $45,000, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Sociology grads could earn twice as much working on an auto assembly line, which pays on average $100,000 a year. Good gig, but not many want it.

And

Still, many men who don’t go to college also don’t want to work in factories or other blue-collar occupations, perhaps because they don’t believe there’s dignity in such jobs. Only 31% of blue-collar workers feel that their type of work is respected, according to a Pew Research Center survey last week.

There is dignity in every job, obviously. But it remains true that the perception of manufacturing jobs and the fact that younger people don’t want them is highly worrisome for those in the manufacturing sector. According to a fact sheet from the National Association of Manufacturers:

Over the next decade, 3.8 million manufacturing jobs will likely be needed, and 1.9 million are expected to be unfilled if we do not inspire more people to pursue modern manufacturing careers. Of open jobs, 2.8 million will come from retirement and 760,000 from industry growth; an estimated 230,000 jobs will be created from recent legislative and regulatory actions. Meanwhile, attracting and retaining talent is the primary business challenge indicated by more than 65% of respondents in the NAM’s Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey for the first quarter of 2024. (Source: Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute).

This will also be a big problem for the administration’s plan.