Do Americans Really Want To Bring Back Manufacturing?
If lots of Americans wanted factory jobs, the domestic labor market would look very different.
President Donald Trump pledged that he would make America "a manufacturing nation once again," during his inauguration speech. Since then, Trump has issued a number of executive orders to this end. But most Americans say that they would not be better off if they worked in a factory.
That's according to the Cato Institute's 2024 Globalization and Trade Survey, which recently went viral. The report found that 80 percent of Americans think the country would be better if more Americans worked in factories, but only 25 percent think they would be better if they worked in a factory.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz described the Cato poll as "a Rorschach test for people on both sides of the free trade debate." Protectionists conclude that the country can increase manufacturing jobs, which account for 8 percent of total nonfarm employment, because 25 percent of respondents say their lives would be better with a factory job. Meanwhile, free traders see that most of the support for manufacturing applies to others working a factory job, not the proponents of manufacturing themselves.
Though the results appear to be inconsistent at first glance, they aren't. Respondents who don't think they'd be better off themselves working in manufacturing could argue that the country would be better off insofar as more manufacturing jobs would improve the lives of other Americans—like the 25 percent of respondents who report their lives would be improved by a factory job.
But do a quarter of Americans actually believe that they'd be better off in manufacturing? The economic concept of revealed preference suggests otherwise. If Americans believed they would be better off entering manufacturing, the U.S. should see manufacturing employment increase over time. But this is neither the historical nor the recent trend.
The last time manufacturing made up 25 percent of total employment was in 1973. It has been steadily declining in its share of employment since then. In absolute terms, manufacturing employees peaked at around 19.6 million in June 1979, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It hovered around 17.5 million from the early 1980s until 2001, when it decreased steadily until reaching a nadir in March 2010: 11.4 million employees. Since November 2022, employment in this sector has held relatively constant at around 12.8 million people.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) August 2024 report found that over 12.9 million Americans were working in manufacturing; the March 2025 report showed that number had fallen to 12.7 million. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in the manufacturing sector decreased from 3.5 percent in August 2024 to 3.1 percent in March 2025, which is evidence that workers are leaving the manufacturing labor force, by choice. There are openings if they wanted them: 482,000 in March.
There are reasons why somebody could believe they'd be better off in a manufacturing job but not pursue one. The factories might be located far away from a respondent's family, friends, and community, so he doesn't pursue a manufacturing opportunity available to him for personal reasons, although it would make him "better off" in purely financial terms. Nonetheless, the fact that manufacturing employment has declined in absolute and relative terms while the sectoral unemployment rate has decreased since then strongly suggests that not all those who said they'd be better off working a factory job meant it.
