President Trump’s pledge to revive American manufacturing is running into the stubborn obstacle of demographic reality.
The pool of blue-collar workers who are able and willing to perform tasks on a factory floor in the United States is shrinking. As baby boomers retire, few young people are lining up to take their place. About 400,000 manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a shortfall that will surely grow if companies are forced to rely less on manufacturing overseas and build more factories in the United States, experts say.
Difficulty attracting and retaining a quality work force has been consistently cited as a “top primary challenge” by American manufacturers since 2017, said Victoria Bloom, the chief economist at the National Association of Manufacturers, which produces a quarterly survey. Only recently has the issue slipped down on the list of challenges, superseded by trade-related uncertainty due to the Trump administration’s tariffs and by increased raw material costs, Ms. Bloom said.
But the scarcity of skilled blue-collar workers remains a long-term problem, according to Ron Hetrick, an economist with Lightcast, a company that provides labor data to universities and industry.
“We spent three generations telling everybody that if they didn’t go to college, they are a loser,” he said. “Now we are paying for it. We still need people to use their hands.”
The hiring challenges faced by American factories are multifaceted.
The president’s crackdown on immigration, which includes attempts to revoke deportation protections for migrants from troubled countries, may eliminate workers who could have filled those jobs.
Many Americans aren’t interested in factory jobs because they often do not pay enough to lure workers away from service jobs that may have more flexible schedules or more comfortable working environments.
For some companies, remaining globally competitive involves the use of sophisticated equipment that requires employees to have extensive training and familiarity with software. And employers cannot simply hire people right out of high school without providing specialized training programs to bring them up to speed. That wasn’t the case in the heyday of American manufacturing.
Attracting motivated young people to manufacturing careers is also a challenge when high school guidance counselors are still judged by how many students go on to college.
College graduates, on the other hand, often do not have the right skills to be successful on a factory floor.
The country is flooded with college graduates who can’t find jobs that match their education, Mr. Hetrick said, and there are not enough skilled blue-collar workers to fill the positions that currently exist, let alone the jobs that will be created if more factories are built in the United States.
The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group whose members are chief executives of companies, has started an initiative in which executives collaborate on strategies to attract and train a new generation of workers in skilled trades. At an event last week in Washington, executives commiserated about how hard it was to find qualified people and swapped tips onstage for overcoming the gap.
Their ideas included combing through existing company job descriptions to prioritize relevant experience over college degrees and recruiting high school students as young as sophomores for experiences that could draw their interest in manufacturing careers.
“For every 20 job postings that we have, there is one qualified applicant right now,” said David Gitlin, the chairman and chief executive of Carrier Global, which produces air-conditioners and furnaces and services heating and cooling equipment.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, Mr. Gitlin said, demand has exploded for technicians to service data centers, which are built with cooling systems called chillers. He estimated that each data center would require four technicians to maintain a single chiller.
“We have 425,000 technicians today,” he said. “We are going to need to hire another four to five hundred thousand over the next 10 years.” But the number of young people going to vocational schools and community colleges, he added, is dropping, not growing.
At the Business Roundtable event, executives praised Mr. Trump’s efforts to revive the country’s industrial base. But some executives acknowledged that the president’s immigration policies posed challenges to any effort to fill the factories that he has pledged to bring back.
Peter J. Davoren, the chairman and chief executive of Turner Construction Company, said that he would like to see “a clear path for citizenship” for immigrants in the construction industry and the food industry.
The Trump administration’s aggressive cuts to training programs for blue-collar workers have also hurt efforts to train a new generation of factory workers. The administration has taken steps to eliminate the Job Corps, a 60-year-old program that provides at-risk youths from 16 to 24 with a path to a career in the trades. Huntington Ingalls Industries, the country’s largest shipbuilder, hired 68 Job Corps graduates in December in its bid to beef up its work force.
“The gap between available skills and needed skills in the work force is widening,” Chris Kastner, the president and chief executive of HII, said. “Technology is evolving fast but education and training systems too often lag behind.”
The Trump administration has rolled out an initiative called Make America Skilled Again, which consolidates existing work force training programs into one initiative that would give states grants if the states meet certain criteria. At least 10 percent of the new Make America Skilled Again funding must be spent on apprenticeships.
In April, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that directed the secretary of labor, the secretary of commerce and the secretary of education to submit a plan to create one million registered apprenticeships. But it is unclear if that ambitious target can be achieved with the funding in Mr. Trump’s budget bill, which trims $1.6 billion from work force training.
In April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent drew the ire of many federal employees when he suggested that American factories could get the labor they needed from the ranks of laid-off government workers. “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government,” he told Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. “That will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.”
But recruiting laid-off federal employees never came up at the Roundtable event. Instead, participants spoke of efforts to train high school students and veterans.
Blake Moret, the chairman and chief executive of Rockwell Automation, a Milwaukee-based process-automation specialist, said his company had created an academy of advanced manufacturing that trained returning service members for 12 weeks.
Sara Armbruster, the chief executive of Steelcase, a company in Grand Rapids, Mich., that designs furniture, said businesses must begin recruiting in high school to educate students and their parents about how rewarding a career in manufacturing could be.
Students often change their minds about a career in manufacturing when they visit the company’s shop floor and see that a modern factory is clean, high-tech and “cool,” she added.
“When they have that moment, it really changes everything in terms of opening up possibilities for them in their career,” she said.
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