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The math isn’ t adding up. The current administration’ s tariff policies designed to encourage domestic manufacturing should be creating American jobs. Instead, US factories shed 78,000 jobs in the year leading to August 2025 according to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with durable goods manufacturing taking the hardest hit.
This isn’ t the reshoring story Americans expected to hear by this point of the year. And it reveals something more important than simple job creation numbers: we’ re trying to rebuild American manufacturing( largely via tariffs) without addressing the fundamental workforce crisis that’ s preventing it from succeeding.
The facilities exist( though many need to be retrofitted to support modern tech). The investment capital is available. The policy incentives are in place. What’ s missing is the skilled workforce capable of making reshoring economically viable for all parties – and that gap is stalling the manufacturing renaissance necessary for the resilience and sustainment of the American economy.
The skills gap nobody wants to talk about
Walk into any manufacturing facility today and you’ ll observe what I call the‘ barbell effect’- a workforce heavily weighted at both ends of the experience spectrum, with a troubling void in the middle.
On one end, you have skilled veterans with decades of institutional knowledge. These workers understand not just how to operate machinery, but why certain processes matter and how to troubleshoot when things go wrong. They possess the kind of expertise that can’ t be downloaded or learned from a manual.
On the other end are younger workers entering an industry that looks dramatically different from the one their predecessors joined. They’ re often underskilled for the technical demands of modern manufacturing, while lacking access to mentorship and education to close those skills gaps.
The problem isn’ t simply that experienced workers are retiring( though they are, and at an accelerating rate). The deeper issue is that the middle generation simply doesn’ t exist with the number of workers necessary to bridge the gap between an aging workforce and an under-equipped younger generation. For the last few decades, manufacturing wasn’ t seen as a viable career path for young Americans. We told an entire generation to pursue college degrees( with the promise of white-collar jobs that delivered, at best,
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