As many have long warned, Donald Trump’s effort to rebuild America’s industrial strength has run into a hard limit: a shortage of workers.
As Joel Kotkin notes, the biggest gap isn’t in high-tech talent or Ph.D.s—it’s in skilled, reliable workers: truck drivers, machinists, welders—people who can simply make things work. America, he writes, is short nearly half a million welders alone.
At first glance, finding a worker or training one should be easy. But anyone who has ever run a factory knows better. You need someone who:
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Shows up, every day. In an office, you can lose focus for a few minutes. On the factory floor, a lapse means bad products—or broken machines.
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Can work for hours without falling apart, surrounded by noise, heat, or fumes, doing physically demanding tasks.
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Is sharp enough to notice when something’s off and understands the machines, not just follows motions mechanically.
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Has basic craft skills—how to measure, cut, fit, and fix.
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Understands simple mechanics, which in turn requires knowing a little physics. (And that’s just a production worker, not a toolmaker or technician.)
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And ideally, takes pride in the job—the kind of person who smiles when he sees the finished product rolling off the line.
A good worker, in other words, isn’t a robot or a trained monkey. Not everyone needs to be a master craftsman, but a nation’s strength depends on having enough people who can keep the engines running—literally.
You can fill a factory with managers and programmers, but they won’t have the instincts or endurance that real labor demands. Nor will people who’ve spent years on welfare or in low-skill service jobs suddenly transform into welders and machinists because some bureaucrat said so.
Now we see the price of shutting down our factories and pretending that everyone could be retrained as a coder or a barista because “the market demanded it.” The problem is, you can’t send the bill to “the market.” There’s no one there to pay for the damage.
And maybe the question goes deeper:
Can a nation produce good workers without a living working-class culture—without communities that value labor, discipline, and pride in creation?
If not, then rebuilding industry isn’t just about bringing back jobs. It’s about bringing back the culture that made work honorable in the first place.