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3471America is pouring billions into reviving its manufacturing sector, but there’s a glaring problem: factories can’t find enough people to do the work.
Right now, there are nearly 500,000 open manufacturing jobs across the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And if nothing changes, that number could explode. One estimate from the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte projects 2.1 million jobs could go unfilled by 2030, potentially costing the U.S. economy $1 trillion that year alone.
The Jobs Are There. So Where Are the Workers?
Manufacturing leaders say they’re struggling to fill both entry-level and highly skilled roles.
More than 65% of companies surveyed in a 2023 report cited hiring and retaining workers as their top challenge.
“The challenge is that there is no one walking around on the street with these skills,” said Carolyn Lee, president of the Manufacturing Institute.
She noted that many roles, like maintenance techs or machine operators, require one to two years of training, plus another couple of years to adapt to a specific plant.
The talent crunch isn’t new. Even before COVID-19, manufacturers were warning about a growing skills gap.
The pandemic only made things worse—about 1.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost in its early days, setting the workforce back more than a decade.
By the end of 2020, 570,000 of those jobs hadn’t returned, even with a record number of job openings.
It’s Not Just About Skills
While skills matter, not everything can be pinned on training. Some critics say manufacturers aren’t offering enough money to attract new talent.
Oren Cass, founder of conservative think tank American Compass, isn’t buying the labor shortage narrative.
“I have less than zero sympathy for employers who go around complaining about labor shortages and skills gaps,” he said.
“If somebody in the United States is 20 times as productive as somebody in China and you have to pay them 20 times as much, you are equally competitive.”
The truth is, wages have gone up in recent years, which helped bring down job openings from their April 2022 peak of more than 1 million.
But that raises another question: can manufacturers pay even more and still compete globally?
A PR Problem, Too
Manufacturing also has an image issue. Many Americans still picture old-school factory work, dirty, loud, and dangerous.
But today’s plants are often high-tech, clean, and full of automation.
“These jobs are in factories that are completely different from the factories of 25 years ago,” said Gordon Hanson, an economist at Harvard Kennedy School.
“They require people to know how to use pretty sophisticated machinery.”
Still, the perception lingers, especially among younger Americans. That could be keeping people from even considering a career in the industry.
The Apprenticeship Fix
One promising solution? Apprenticeships. Programs like FAME (Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education) offer students the chance to earn while they learn, working three days a week in a factory and spending two days in a community college classroom.
FAME graduates typically finish the 21-month program without debt and with higher earning potential.
A Brookings Institution study found they were making nearly $98,000 five years later, compared to around $53,000 for peers who didn’t go through the program.
Lee, whose organization now runs FAME nationally, sees it as a model worth scaling up.
But the U.S. still lags behind other countries in apprenticeship enrollment. In 2022, only 0.3% of working-age Americans were in such programs, compared to 3.6% in Switzerland.
What’s Next?
Late last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for a plan to create over 1 million new apprenticeships. Whether that becomes reality remains to be seen.
What is clear: reshoring manufacturing isn’t just about tariffs or factory construction.
It’s about reshaping education, improving training programs, and maybe rethinking how we value and promote blue-collar careers.
“It takes a workforce system to make it happen,” Hanson said.
Manufacturing may be back. But unless something changes, the workers won’t be.
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