Do Amazon Workers Dream of Electric Sheep?

Image by 🌼Christel🌼 from Pixabay

Did you know that Americans still dream of factory jobs? According to NPR, they do, anyway.

President Donald Trump seems to think so, too. According to the article:

"Jobs in factories will come roaring back into our country," said President Trump when he announced reciprocal tariffs last month. "We will supercharge our domestic industrial base."

Will we? Who’s looking for these jobs? Millennials? Gen Z? In the U.S.? Really?

However, the article goes on to observe:

The American manufacturing sector is not what it once was. Since its peak of 19.6 million workers in 1979, American manufacturing has lost over a third of its workers, now employing 12.7 million.

Ask anyone who lived in a place like Pittsburgh or other cities with industrial-based economies. Even in 1979, the smart money was on computers. And, if you could find a job without a degree, you were lucky or had connections. I had a little luck and no connections. Well, not many.

But let’s look at the questions raised here:

Question 1: Why is there so much cultural nostalgia around factory jobs?

"The picture that we get with smokestack nostalgia is that these were good, solid jobs that people had for generations," he says, "that forgets that it was union activity that secured those [wages]. And it was often [a] violent struggle, right?"

In fact, salaries for manufacturing jobs are now in the bottom half of all jobs. And one paper by researchers at the Federal Reserve shows that the decline in unionization rates is, by and large, responsible for the drop in wages for factory work compared to other jobs.

Good times, huh? Well, no.