Reindustrializing America Without Retraining Americans Is Futile
Ford's CEO recently recognized a seldom-discussed problem with bringing jobs back.
By Jacob Grandstaff
In a recent interview, Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley repeatedly warned that America no longer produces enough young people to fill available jobs.
On Office Hours: Business Edition, a podcast hosted by former Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley, Farley complained that good-paying trade jobs are out there. There just aren’t enough competent Americans to fill them. He added that Ford has “a bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it.”
He said that Ford has 5,000 mechanic jobs that pay $120,000 each but can’t fill them. The caveat, of course, is that workers require five years of training to reach that pay scale. And the infrastructure to train them no longer exists.
“We do not have trade schools,” he said. “We are not investing in training our next generation—people like my grandfather, who had nothing and built a middle-class life.
But it’s not just at Ford where Farley sees a mismatch in jobs and workers.
“We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians, and tradesmen,” he said. “God forbid we ever get into a war. Google’s not going to be able to make the tanks and the planes. This is a self-defense for our country issue.”
The problem is Americans in both parties want “reshoring” and “reindustrialization” without asking where companies are supposed to find the workers to make things.
Tariffs can help force companies back home. But bringing them back will not recreate 1975. The 20-year-olds who once manned assembly lines in the 1970s are now dead or in their 70s. Meanwhile, their grandsons have been told by parents, counselors, social media, and the entire price structure of the economy that manual work is for ex-cons and immigrants.
The old pipeline—high-school trade classes feeding directly into apprenticeships and trade schools—has been replaced by the four-year prep, community college model, which rehashes high school basics for C-students who want a discounted degree in beer and girls.
The results are predictable. “American jobs” often mean the same foreign workforce, just on U.S. soil.
Prevent Offshoring and Immigration and Watch the Free Market Do Its Thing
Real reindustrialization—where working-class Americans make things, buy modest houses in their 20s, raise families, and retire securely—requires something more radical than tariffs, tax credits, and ribbon cuttings.
As long as CEOs think they can wait out the populist storm to restore high immigration flows, they have no incentive to spend the necessary capital to redevelop a domestic, skilled workforce.
The only policy that will ever change corporate behavior is shock therapy—dam legal immigration to a trickle indefinitely. Only when all hope is removed for the foreign labor safety net will genuine reindustrialization occur.
Yes, the stock market will crater, labor costs will explode, and supply chains will snap.
Entire models may be discontinued when manufacturers discover the average 22-year-old American wants $45 an hour and a signing bonus to spend eight hours of his day without his smartphone.
But expecting the economy to react differently is like expecting a drug addict to get clean without going through withdrawals. American companies are addicted to foreign labor. It’s time to force them into rehab.
The worker-to-job mismatch isn’t a glitch in the free market. It comes from bad government and institutional planning that undermines the American worker.
Right now, there’s little incentive to fund more trade schools.
First—and as any teacher can attest—few students who don’t attend college become career-minded on their own initiative. Unless someone tells these future auto body mechanics that they can make $120,000 after working just five years at Ford, most won’t take to Google to find out.
And unless Ford needs them more than they need Ford, the company isn’t going to tell them.
The lack of incentive to recruit and train non-academically inclined American teenagers for the trades owes to the bipartisan neoliberal consensus that sorted workers into three tiers. The first were Americans who had what it took to become successful white-collar professionals. The second: Hard-working, skilled immigrants who took the blue-collar jobs. As for those Americans who didn’t have what it took… well, somebody has to stock shelves at Target and Walmart, the thinking went.
Undoing that arrangement will not happen overnight or come cheaply. But the ugly alternative is to accept that “Made in America” doesn’t mean “Made by Americans.” In that scenario, it would be better to keep the status quo and let companies boost profits overseas rather than flood the U.S. with foreigners.
Farley seems sincere in his desire to return to the days of his father and grandfather, when factories were staffed by skilled Americans. The fastest way to get those workers back is to make it too expensive for companies like his own to offshore jobs—but also make it impossible to hire non-Americans.
The pain will be sharp but temporary. The payoff will be a restored industrial base manned by American citizens.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/12/02/reindustrializing-america-without-retraining-americans-is-futile/
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