PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

Well, in fact, we've seen more manufacturing jobs created since I've been president than anytime since the 1990s. That's a fact. And you know, if you look at just the auto industry as an example, they've had record sales and they've hired back more people over the last five years than they have for a very long, long time.

We actually make more stuff, have a bigger manufacturing base today than we've had in most of our history. The problems have been — part of the problems have had to do with jobs going overseas and this is one of the reasons why I've been trying to negotiate trade deals to raise wages and environmental standards in other countries, so that they're not undercutting us.

But frankly, part of it has had to do with automation. You go into an auto factory today that used to have 10,000 people and now they've got 1,000 people making the same number of cars or more. And — so what that means is even though we're making the same amount of stuff in our manufacturing sector, we're employing fewer people.

Now, the good news is that there are entire new industries that are starting to pop up and you're actually seeing some manufacturers coming back to the United States because they're starting to realize, "You know what? Energy prices are lower here, workers are better here, this is our biggest market. And so even though we off-shored and went someplace else before, now it turns out we're better off going ahead and manufacturing here."

But for those folks who have lost their job right now because a plant went down the Mexico, that isn't going to make you feel better. And so what we have to do is to make sure that folks are trained for the jobs that are coming in now because some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back, and when somebody says, like the person you just mentioned who I'm not going to advertise for, that he's going to bring all these jobs back, well how exactly are you going to do that? What are you going to do?

There's — there's no answer to it. He just says, "Well, I'm going to negotiate a better deal." Well, how — what — how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually, the answer is he doesn't have an answer.

So what I've tried to do, what my administration's tried to do is let's grow those manufacturing sectors, like clean energy, like some of these new technologies that are coming up, let's focus on those. We've set up, for example, manufacturing hubs where we work with universities, local businesses, local governments, to create research labs that can take something like 3-D printing or, you know, nanotechnology — all kinds of stuff that I can't really explain because, you know, scientists and really smart people know all about it — and said let's invest in this so that when the new jobs come, they're coming here.

But I've got to tell you that the days when you just being able to — you just being willing to work hard and you can now walk into a plant and suddenly there's going to be a job for you for 30 years or 40 years, that's just not going to be there for our kids because more and more, that stuff's going to be automated. And if you go into a factory, that kid's going to need to know computers or is going to need to know some science and some math because they're not even going to be picking anything up, they're just going to be working on a keyboard.

And that's why we put so much emphasis on job training, community colleges, that's why I've proposed making the first two years of community college free so that we know that every young person, they're going to be able to — if they're not going for a full four-year degree, at least they're going to be getting the technical training they need for those jobs in the future.

But you cannot look backwards, and that doesn't make folks feel good sometimes, especially if it's a town that was reliant on a couple of big manufacturers. But they're going to have to retrain for the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past.