As we celebrate Labor Day, our nation is discovering anew the value of making and building things, from cars to semiconductor chips to steel, and to the factories where products are made.
The allure of manufacturing jobs is as strong as ever. Many even say it helped win an election. And most agree that tariff policy, whether they think it’s right or wrong, is likely to bring at least some manufacturing back to America.
The cause is laudable. After all, making things in our country is vital for a strong economy and national security.
Over the last five decades, de-industrialization has decimated our nation’s manufacturing base, erasing well-paid jobs in communities and leaving millions of families in a downward spiral of economic despair. From 1939 to 1979 manufacturing roared in the U.S., still accounting for 22 percent of non-farm employment by the end of the seventies. By 2019, that percentage had plummeted to 9 percent, and dropped again by 2024 to 8 percent.
Entire communities have lost their economic foundations, leading to the labeling of a swath of our nation from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin as a “rust belt.” Offshoring manufacturing shattered the promise for millions of men and women that, if you work hard with your hands, you can be a proud and productive contributor to your family, community and nation.
But the success story of good manufacturing jobs didn’t begin with factories — and ignoring this history as we try to recapture manufacturing capacity will doom the dream of a renaissance.
Enormous wealth was made by the barons of manufacturing. For workers, the bounty was not always shared.
Jobs building cars were not always good jobs. Nor were those mining coal or forging steel or any number of other products. By 1900, as the industrial revolution took hold, industrial accidents killed 35,000 workers each year and maimed 500,000 more, all while they earned poverty wages.
Prior to the formation of the United Steel Workers union in 1942, children often worked 12-hour days in dangerous mills for little pay. Before the powerful sit-down strikes by United Auto Workers Union members in the 1930s, the average wage of an auto worker was 61 cents per hour — about $14 in today’s valuation. Within five years of those strikes, average pay increased by more than half, eventually rising to solid middle-class salaries.
During the coal boom between 1880 and 1923, more than 70,000 miners died on the job, crushed to death in roof collapses or killed by gas explosions and by machinery. To improve their working conditions and their treatment by company employers, coal miners and their families organized the United Mine Workers Union.
Before workers organized, paid time off, the 40-hour work week, health care, safe jobs and secure pensions were rare. These were not inherent qualities of manufacturing work. They were won through the collective action of workers that often included risk, sacrifice and even death. As a result of their sacrifice, generations of workers were able to claw their way into the middle class.
But with the advent of NAFTA in 1992 and the emergence of China a decade later, U.S. manufacturing jobs, and the percentage of workers who had a union, began to plummet. Companies sought cheaper labor across the world. In 1980, 32.3 percent of manufacturing workers were union members. By 2023, just 7.9 percent of manufacturing workers were union members, only slightly higher than the 5.9 percent rate for the private sector as a whole. Because of the decline in union density, the quality of manufacturing jobs went down again.
Today, 34 percent of the families of manufacturing workers are enrolled in public safety net programs. For workers employed through staffing agencies — not uncommon in many sectors — the percentage is 50 percent. That’s about the same as the rate for fast-food workers.
On this Labor Day, we are right to dream about tens of thousands of new jobs building and making things. Our country needs the kind of jobs that once powered the middle class. Building factories is only part of the solution. History shows that it was workers, empowered by unions and their collective action, who made manufacturing jobs good jobs.
A new manufacturing base without empowered workers will not be a return to the manufacturing era we now look upon with envy. It will be a return to the era that preceded it — one in which hard work does not carry the reward of a place in our nation’s middle class.
Brian J. Hale is president and CEO of Ullico, Inc., the nation’s only labor-owned insurance and investment company.
