In a recent column, Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley made some good points and provided some supporting statistics on the decreasing percentage of American men who want to work in manufacturing or, for that matter, who want to work at all (“A Good Man for U.S. Manufacturing Is Hard to Find,” April 6, 2025).
I agree with her and make the additional point that many manufacturing operations and jobs are not as high-paying and profitable as commonly believed. My qualifications for saying so include the fact that unlike most Americans, I have extensive firsthand experience in manufacturing (and natural resources).
For example, to help pay for my college degree, I once worked as a laborer in an aluminum fabrication plant, and then in my subsequent business career, was a manager and executive for an international packaged-goods conglomerate, and later, for a diversified company that had eleven business units in manufacturing and natural resources.
Also, on a family note, my 33-year-old son is an engineer for a major defense contractor.
His best friend is an engineer for Intel in the Phoenix suburbs of Chandler and Gilbert. I recently asked the friend if Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) was poaching Intel engineers, given that TSMC is building advanced plants in metro Phoenix and that morale has fallen at Intel. He replied that Intel engineers and American engineers in general are reluctant to work for TSMC, because, like other Asian companies, it expects professional employees to work long hours and on weekends.
“Manufacturing” is a catchall category that encompasses widely different kinds of operations requiring widely different skill levels and offering widely different levels of pay. All manufacturing is not created equal, all manufacturing is not high-wage and high-skill, and all manufacturing does not lead to widespread prosperity.
A clean room in an Intel fab, for instance, is quite different from the noise, smoke, fumes, and hazards of the aluminum fabrication plant of my youth, where I met the skill requirement of being able to swing a hammer for eight hours a day. It was the worst job I have ever held, far worse than my stints in high school and college as a union painter, a grocery stock clerk and checker, a sewer construction inspector, a janitor, and a bartender.
Or take a different industry. Take the production of oriented strand boards for home construction. Producing oriented strand boards is quite different from producing circuit boards for computers—as I saw firsthand in my management career.
An OSB plant was a marvel of automation. It had to be, given that the boards were a commodity of high cyclicality and subject to considerable price pressure. Logs would enter at one end of the mammoth plant and finished boards would exit at the other end, with few employees in between.
The circuit board plant was also under considerable price pressure, but the operation wasn’t conducive to much automation. It had rows and rows of low-wage immigrant Vietnamese women manually inserting and soldering electric components on boards pre-printed with circuitry by imported machines.
As I also saw, producing carbon black for the tire industry is quite different from producing Snickers bars in a Mars, Inc. plant. Workers in a carbon black plant in a dreary part of the Texas panhandle were covered in sweat and what looked like furnace soot. Workers in a Snickers plant wore white coveralls in a spotless, temperature-controlled environment.
A small plant producing polymer beads in a depressing town outside of ugly Beaumont, Texas was a low-wage supplier to the auto industry. The plant took polymers produced at a Beaumont petrochemical plant and ran them through extruders to produce a mix of polymer beads for shipment to a company that turned them into bumpers for cars. Operating an extruder all day is not very rewarding, either financially or emotionally.
On the other hand, a Mars pet food plant in Germany was rewarding, once employees became accustomed to the smell of Russian horse meat being cooked and processed. The plant was highly automated and benefited from German-engineered machinery and German engineering know-how.
Even if Trump’s tariff scheme was not inchoate, slapdash, and contradictory—and even if he were willing to forgo the scheme and get other countries to eliminate all tariffs—US manufacturers would still have to compete on labor, especially for tasks that can’t be automated.
That’s easier said than done, as my experience found and as Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley suggested.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at craigcantoni@gmail.com.
