Without Unions, Factory Jobs Aren’t Great

Trump and his acolytes want us to forget that factories were horrific places to work until unionization drives in the first decades of the twentieth century introduced some modicum of security, safety, and industrial democracy. William Blake was right to describe early factories as “dark satanic mills.” For anybody needing a refresher on what exactly this looked like, grab a copy of Upton Sinclair’s 1905 exposé The Jungle, written during the very same Gilded Age that Trump explicitly wants us to return to.

But you don’t need examples from the distant past to get a sense of what types of manufacturing jobs Trump would reintroduce. Just look at the South today, the one region of the country where manufacturing jobs have continued to grow.

Far from being bastions of security like in the 1950s, these jobs are unsafe, precarious, and relatively low-paid, especially for part-time and temporary workers. Due to the proliferation of nonunion manufacturing jobs in the US South, one-third of all American manufacturing production workers now rely on food stamps or other federal assistance programs to get by. As policy analyst Matt Bruenig points out, McDonald’s workers in Denmark make more than Honda workers in Alabama.

Nonunion manufacturing jobs also tend to be very dangerous. A 2023 academic study found that up to one in five manufacturing workers in Mississippi and Alabama had been injured on the job — a rate nearly four times higher than the national factory average. As one Bloomberg report notes, records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) “document burning flesh, crushed limbs, dismembered body parts, and a flailing fall into a vat of acid. The files read like Upton Sinclair, or even [Charles] Dickens.” If MAGA has its way, OSHA won’t even be functioning much longer to document such abuses.

Without a union, factory work can be an incredibly stressful and dehumanizing ordeal. In an interview she did with me for my new book, a quality inspector at the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama, named Quichelle Liggins lamented that one of her coworkers took their life in 2023. Another did the same in April 2024. Relentless management pressure was the reason given in one of their suicide notes.

Factory jobs aren’t inherently good jobs. In fact, the pay of manufacturing work is now on average worse than other occupations (see Figure 1). And this wage trend has emerged despite the fact that the US manufacturing sectors most decimated by globalization have been low-paid, labor-intensive industries like textiles. In other words, even the virtual disappearance of US garment sweatshops due to competition with China — where 52 percent of manufacturing is labor-intensive — has not made up for the overall degradation of manufacturing employment in our country.

Factory jobs generally only become good jobs when workers unionize, which is why the efforts of the revitalized United Auto Workers (UAW) to organize the South are so pivotal. Yet far from encouraging unionization, Trump has so far acted as one of the most anti-union presidents in modern American history. As such, it is absurd for MAGA defenders like Batya Ungar-Sargon to claim that Trump’s recent tariff offensive proves he is “waging class warfare on Wall Street for the sake of the working class.”

How Many Manufacturing Jobs Could Come Back?

Trump and his acolytes are wrong that factory jobs on their own will usher in a new golden age for American workers. But perhaps, as various blue-collar unions have suggested, rebuilding US factories might be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for economic success. Trump, in this view, could constitute an unwitting midwife to working-class revitalization, by helping end the free trade model that has proven so disastrous for American industrial workers and industrial workers around the world.

There’s a grain of truth in the formula that manufacturing plus unionization equals prosperity. But it’s necessary to specify just how big a grain it is. How many workers would benefit from domestic reshoring?

Unfortunately, there’s little evidence that unionized manufacturing can be a decisive game changer for the US working class as a whole. Hard industry — while still economically and geopolitically central — can’t create enough jobs to be the solution, even when you add unionization into the mix. No matter what trade policies are implemented, there’s no way America can return to anywhere close to its past peak, when one in three workers were employed in manufacturing.

There are two main reasons why the share of manufacturing jobs has been steadily declining in all advanced capitalist countries for over fifty years, even in countries like Japan, where the government has systematically boosted domestic industries, and in Germany, where the government runs huge trade surpluses. Most crucially, increases in productivity and automation mean that factories today need far fewer workers than they did in the past. And, secondly, consumer demand tends to drive forward an overall shift toward services.

Take a look at Figure 2 and you’ll see that America’s deindustrialization process long predates big neoliberal trade benchmarks like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. Given these dynamics, economist Paul Krugman notes that Trump’s nominal goal of eliminating America’s trade deficit “would get us from 10 percent of employment to maybe 12.5 percent of employment.” Similarly, a 2021 report on this question concludes that “moving to a trade balance would only increase manufacturing employment by a few million workers at most.”

Whether we like it or not, America’s workforce will continue to overwhelmingly work in the service sector. That said, it would be an important boon to a significant number of non-college-educated workers and blue-collar unions if new trade policies could re-shore a few million more factory jobs, especially in capital-intensive sectors like auto and computer chips. Though Trump vastly overstates their impact, trade policies do matter. Figure 3, for example, tracks a significant dip in manufacturing employment after 2000, mostly caused by trade liberalization, especially with China.

For that reason, Shawn Fain and the UAW are justified in pushing for selective tariffs to rebuild American auto. Capital-intensive jobs have long been a crucial target for unionization, since they have a high ceiling for wage growth and provide their workforces with a high degree of disruptive power. Policy efforts to re-shore industry could do wonders for the collective assertiveness of autoworkers nationwide. Constant threats of factories moving abroad have sapped the fighting spirit and expectations of manufacturing workers nationwide since the late 1970s. Once capital flight is perceived to be less of a threat, workers will be more willing to act on their hopes, not just their fears.

It makes sense for unions like the UAW to push hard for re-shoring. But working people as a whole need unionization and electoral strategies capable of turning things around in all corners of the economy.

All Workers Deserve More

Trump’s vision for a reindustrialized America may in some sense be beside the point, since the chaos and unpopularity of his “reckless tariffs on all countries at crazy rates,” as Fain put it this week, might ultimately do more to undermine manufacturing than to promote it. Additionally, the new administration has already begun imploding Joe Biden’s successful push to subsidize high-tech goods like electric vehicles, solar panels, and semiconductors.

But Trump is doing more than waging economic warfare. He’s telling a story about America’s decline and potential rebirth that needs to be challenged directly.

Trump’s conflation of factory jobs with good jobs omits the indispensable role of unions. And it misleadingly suggests that service-sector employment must remain bad for the indefinite future. The reality is that any job could become a good job with collective bargaining, as the example of McDonald’s workers in Denmark so clearly demonstrates. All working-class people deserve economic dignity, including the vast majority who will continue to work in the service sector no matter what trade policies are implemented.

You don’t have to work in a factory to be a “real worker” or to economically prosper. But you probably do need a union.