Summary
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted on CBS’s Face the Nation that US workers won’t reclaim traditional manufacturing jobs under Trump’s tariff-heavy strategy.
While promising “trillions” in new investment, he confirmed that new factories would be automated. Lutnick touted support roles like mechanics and HVAC technicians instead.
Critics cite the tariff policy inconsistency and rising consumer costs.
Market reactions have been severe, with steep losses and fears of trade wars as China and others prepare retaliatory tariffs.
And the factories that arent fully-automated, will be Asian-style sweatshops, with low pay, no benefits, no unions, teen labor, no health/ safety/ environmental regulations, mandated overtime without OT pay, etc.
Everybody who is excited about the “return of manufacturing” is deluding themselves if they think the new mamufacturing model is going to emulate the model that sent manufacturing overseas in the first place.
That’s just it … I think part of the plan (if you can call it that) is to crater the US economy and send everyone out into the streets with nothing … millionaires and billionaires won’t be affected (or affected that much) … once everyone is poor with no choice, no voice, no ability, no money, then you can restart and rebuild an economy built on sweatshop, low pay, even no pay, no benefits, no unions, teen labor, child labor, no health / safety / environmental regulations, mandated overtime with no OT pay, etc
Why go to Asia to get this? … just bring it all to America. No better model of manufacturing than to do everything at home rather than send out business to the other side of the globe .
They’re gonna have a great time building their army of wage slaves, until they find out they have no one left to sell to.
They’re trying to create a consumer economy with no consumers.
Sure, after all, you get to save all that money on shipping from Asia, and all that sweet profit goes directly into their pockets. It might be as much as a 1% increase!
That’s worth destroying America, and the lives of 99% of our population, AND the world economy, for an inconsequential amount of money for people who already have more money than they or their heirs can ever spend.
It’s easier to unionize domestically. Yes, they will start as non-union. But then you can unionize them.
Not to say this is the way to bring them back;; it’s absolutely not. But it would be GOOD if measures were in place to actually bring them back, as they could be forced to provide higher paying jobs
These people are living in a deluded fantasy world. Who’s going to pay for all this automation? The same companies that are going to be losing money hand-over-fist, because no one can afford to buy their products anymore? I have no idea why they think putting the economy in a choke hold is going to stimulate this kind of investment.
And if they think robots would be cheaper than human labor at a time when people are struggling to afford basic necessities, then once again these idiots are proving that they don’t understand anything about basic economics. Or life, for that matter.
As if the countries getting tariff’d don’t know anything about automating factory work. It’s almost as dumb as when we thought nobody else could come up with competitive AI models and the market crashed when DeepSeek was released.
Workers are getting fucked with more inflation so a handful of billionaires get significant tax breaks. There is no secondary objective.
The funny thing about these automated factories is the question, how long it will take to build them and who will build them? How long until the product is done as quickly as cheaply as overseas, without these work robots constantly malfunctioning or needing repairs? There is a reason only certain industries are almost fully automated, it’s simply not efficient to use (fairly expensive) robots for everything. You need a product that sells for a lot of money (like cars) for it to create a profit. But what do I know I’m not a billionaire.
Because they are idiots, there is no mistery, the mediocres are running the USA
The only question I’m wondering about:
Is Trump just an idiot or Putin’s useful idiot? How much of this is sheer stupidity and how much is deliberate chaos controlled by a foreign entity?
The fact that Trump put Tariffs on penguins but not Russians feels telling.
… and it goes to show all the pATriOtISm these assholes and their followers actually hold
I wish it was the mediocre, its being run by the willfully ignorant.
right you are… calling them mediocre is cutting them slack
Ah yes. The one mechanic per hundred machines or whatever is totally the same as millions of factory jobs.
Why the hell do these people want to be enslaved in factories anyway?
We can have unskilled labor that doesn’t involve possibly being mangled by machinery.
The problem isn’t the jobs, it’s the lack of jobs and the wage rate not keeping pace with production capacity and inflation for the last 50 years.
Dumb Trump supporters want mindless factory jobs to return because they think it will bring back higher wages. Those high wages came from unions, not factories being uniquely high paying. Unions are the reason workers once had a fair standard of living and people need to remember their collective power.
Why the hell do these people want to be enslaved in factories anyway?
There is a very specific type of American subset that is in love with that fantasy. Real, honest, hard, labor, subservient and reliable. It gives some people purpose, value, even hope. Even for those who did not experience it firsthand, there is a tangible sense of loss for that type of American experience.
Like religion, labor can function as meaning when life appears too complex for deeper understanding.
“enslaved in factories”
Factories and similar jobs are the first ones that got unionized and work conditions ended up being the best that someone could expect without higher educations. That’s what people lost with globalization and what they think they’ll get back, but without unions that won’t happen.
