Younger USA citizens don't want jobs in manufacturing?
While Donald Trump's efforts to reinstate factory jobs in the USA is admirable, a most serious problem lies within whether younger locals want to work in manufacturing:
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. [...]That is certainly troubling, and further observations can be found here, such as:
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.
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.Of course this is appalling, and maybe the best way to turn around the situation is to raise the wages? Of course, maybe that's what they're doing, and we have to hope it'll pay off in the long run, because heathcare requires certain manufacturization too, ditto technology.
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.
Labels: Moonbattery, United States, White House
