In June, the White House said President Trump’s signature package of tax cuts would “unleash our economy and deliver a Blue-Collar BOOM.”
The president and his vice president, JD Vance, have also pledged that Mr. Trump’s tariff campaign would revive manufacturing jobs, including those in the skilled trades.
Instead, the parts of the blue-collar labor market occupied primarily by men have been slowing for over a year. Jobs in sectors that include the trades, such as manufacturing and construction, have racked up roughly 150,000 net losses on an annual basis as of March, based on calculations by Joey Politano, an economic analyst. In contrast, health care and social assistance jobs, professions that women typically dominate, generated the most job growth in 2025.
More tradesmen like plumbers and pipe fitters are retiring, opening up some opportunities for younger workers, but the slowdown in hiring across the labor market is limiting demand for new labor. Mr. Trump’s tariff increases, which he said would bring blue-collar jobs back to the United States, have instead raised costs for manufacturers — as well as the repair and maintenance sectors — and elevated inflation and interest rates have also slowed business.
Layoffs are low across the economy — and in the trades, too. But hiring rates have slumped to the drab pace of 2009, when the unemployment rate was 10 percent, twice as high as it is now. Hiring across the manufacturing sector, which encompasses the trades, has declined roughly 40 percent since 2022.
“There are jobs available,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for RSM, an accounting firm. “But right now, demand for blue-collar labor is not sufficient to meet the supply.”
Changing Prospects
For years, hiring managers in the trades complained about labor shortages. After President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed legislation that encouraged a burst of infrastructure projects, job openings in manufacturing, which include welders, machinists and mechanics, peaked in 2022.
Over the past few years, however, openings have plummeted to 2018 levels, even as the economy has grown much larger. Job openings in construction, which include carpenters, HVAC installers and ironworkers, have fallen to levels last seen in 2016.
Even so, U.S. labor force participation among men ages 25 to 54 is well above levels from last decade, rising over the past year to 90 percent, compared with 78 percent for women.
Federal Reserve researchers have noted that the drop from higher male participation levels in the late 20th century also reflects younger millennials’ enrolling in postsecondary education at higher rates through their late 20s.
“This idea that all these people need to do is go into the trades or whatever is just not supported by the data,” said Guy Berger, a labor economist and senior adviser at Access Macro, a consulting firm.
As artificial intelligence threatens various forms of entry-level white-collar work, some career advisers and business leaders point to work in the trades as potentially A.I.-proof. Unionized skilled workers benefit from solid middle-class pay once trained and licensed. And the “college-wage premium,” as economist call it, has stagnated, especially as the cost of four-year college has risen.
Still, that premium is still high overall. Economists at the Cleveland Fed estimated in a 2025 paper that the wages of college-educated workers in the coming years are likely to be 76 percent more than those of workers with less education.
“There’s less of a penalty to not having a four-year degree than in the past, but there’s still a penalty,” Mr. Berger said.
Business owners and economists say the doldrums of the job market for the trades can be explained by a messy trio of overlapping factors.
Commercial activity has decelerated throughout the country. Immigration has tanked since Mr. Trump returned to office, halting a steady inflow of men willing to do entry-level, blue-collar work at relatively low incomes. And interest rates, which have risen again since the war with Iran, have frozen the housing market — the steadiest source of work for many tradesmen.
“It’s a cyclical sector,” said Marco Zappacosta, the chief executive of Thumbtack, an online marketplace for people looking to hire tradespeople. “When you look further out, past this cycle, you see the trends that are causing people to pay attention here.”
Finding the Right People
Jack Marquardt, the owner of Electric Avenue, a contractor in the Portland, Ore., area, graduated from high school in 2013. He applied to universities, assuming that was what a young person was supposed to do.
“I wanted to go to college with all my friends,” he said.
But after one semester, fearful of incurring debt, he dropped out, and joined the Army National Guard. After basic training, he stumbled into an electrician apprenticeship and found that he liked working with his hands and putting ideas to the test more than office work.
Now 30, a licensed electrician with a wife and three children, Mr. Marquardt spends much of what would otherwise be downtime recruiting young people to his trade.
Eleven of Electric Avenue’s 12 employees are under age 40, a point of pride for him. And non-apprentice full-time roles pay well, averaging $50 or more an hour. Identifying suitable workers, “the people that are super motivated and super hard-working,” isn’t easy, he argued.
But, he said, electrical contractors also face the opposite problem — a lack of projects or positions available. Business has picked up for Mr. Marquardt in recent months, he added, “but I know a lot of guys who are out of work right now”
Hard-to-square mismatches in the sector stem from two factors, veteran tradesmen said: how long it takes to go from lower-paid apprentice to licensed tradesmen — hourly wages for yearslong apprenticeships can be as low as the midteens — and the specific qualifications that make someone a fit for a given job in a way that isn’t clear from a job posting alone.
“It’s all about finding the right people — just because somebody shows up with a pulse, or even an electrical license, that doesn’t automatically mean that we could use them,” said Carl Murawski, who works at Ducci Electrical, a construction company in Farmington, Conn.
“We had an interview yesterday — this kid came in — and he already knows how to do a lot of technical highway construction work, highway lighting and signs and stuff like that,” Mr. Murawski said. “He held all the cards, because there’s not many people with that type of experience. We were just one of several interviews he was doing.”
Mr. Murawski is an evangelist for the trades. On his YouTube channel, he gives career advice, reviews work gear and hosts debates among practitioners of different crafts. But he’s not shy about the workload. He recently broke his fibula after a pole fell on him.
It can be especially tough, he said, if you’re a “gopher” starting out — hauling heavy materials, working nights and early mornings in hot attics or outdoors in frigid weather.
“Some boosters of the trades glorify it and maybe aren’t as upfront about the downsides,” he said.
Richard Reeves, an author of “A New Contract With the Middle Class” and the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, said that for all of the talk of labor shortages in the trades, the health care and education sectors, which are growing faster, had several times more job openings.
Similar to how proponents of the trades have spent years trying to destigmatize manual labor, Mr. Reeves and his group have argued for destigmatizing “care economy” work for men. Job preferences among the sexes tend to be sticky. In recent years, though, the share of men in nursing has increased to 11 percent from 9 percent.
“If we want men to have job opportunities, then we need to get them into these jobs where the job opportunities are coming from,” Mr. Reeves said. “I desperately want to get this whole issue about what’s happening to boys and men away from the culture war stuff, away from the dinner party lamentations about ‘the manosphere,’ and into the reality of the economy.”
The A.I. data center build-out is providing strong, but spotty, opportunities for workers in the trades.
“In the areas where data centers are being built, they literally can’t find bodies fast enough,” said Steve Metzman, the chief executive of Connected Apprentice, which facilitates digital training for trades work.
But interest rates may need to drop before the gains can spread to more of the country and the types of construction connected to housing. If job openings tick up, Mr. Murawski, the electrician from Connecticut, said, a fresh supply of workers might start looking for something new.
“We’ve already had some guys come in asking about work because they’re trying to get away from A.I.,” he said. “It’s a good option for some people. The right person has a tremendous amount of opportunity in front of them.”
Talmon Joseph Smith is a Times economics reporter, based in New York.
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