Donald Trump thinks the only way to make America great again is to bring back millions of manufacturing jobs, but what he and his supporters don’t get is that there’s nothing inherently great about a job in a factory.

For the most part, factories are noisy and dangerous places. The work can be mind-numbingly repetitive. So what’s the big fascination with manufacturing?

We know why Trump and his supporters idolize factory work: Because back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a factory job was great to have if you didn’t have a high school diploma or a specialized skill. A factory job was a ticket into the middle class. A factory job bestowed dignity.

More importantly, a factory job paid well, offered good fringe benefits and frequently was considered a job for life.

The “greatness” of a factory job had almost nothing to do with the job itself and almost everything to do with the fact that workers had some power to bargain with the bosses to get better pay, better benefits and better working conditions.

Unfortunately for workers, their power has fallen sharply over the past four decades, just as the forces of automation, globalization and financialization strengthened. The decline can be seen in the stagnant incomes of the bottom 95%. It can be seen in the spectacular rise in corporate profits. And it can be seen in the loss of American manufacturing jobs.

America doesn’t miss manufacturing; it misses unions.

Unions turned poorly treated factory workers into aspirational middle-class homeowners and consumers.

But that process has reversed. The decades-old war on organized labor is moving to a new decisive phase with the ascendancy of the Republicans in Washington. Workers don’t have a friend at the Labor Department, or at the National Labor Relations Board, or in Congress, where it’s likely that a national “right-to-work” law will be passed that will further weaken the right of workers to organize.



Nor do they have a friend in the White House, no matter what he says.

Although factory jobs once offered better-than-average wages, production workers now earn 12% less than the average U.S. worker. The decline in the wage premium for factory work mirrors almost exactly the decline in the percentage of workers represented by a union.

The decline in union representation has matched the decline in the wage premium that workers used to get for having a factory job.

Some factory jobs today pay so poorly that a third of manufacturing production workers rely on some form of welfare (food stamps, Medicaid or the earned-income tax credit) to keep their families out of poverty.

An increasing share of factory workers are actually employed not by the factory owner but by temporary-help agencies, which often pay just above the minimum wage and offer no benefits or job security.

A lot of people will say that powerful unions accelerated the loss of American jobs by pushing costs up so high that American factories couldn’t compete any more. Unions were a victim of their own success. Factories closed, jobs were lost and the production moved to low-cost countries, such as China and Mexico.

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But that wasn’t the only possible outcome.

Look at the German experience. Although only about 18% of German workers belong to unions, workers have a lot of power in Germany. They have a strong say in how corporations are run. Most wages are subject to collective bargaining. Workers have a seat at the table in politics as well as in business.

What’s more, German corporations are more focused on long-term objectives than their American counterparts. German manufacturers have prioritized keeping high-skilled jobs in Germany. American manufacturers prioritize maximizing shareholder value in the short term, even if it means hollowing out a company’s competitive advantage in the long run.

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So even though German manufacturing workers make about 12% more than more than American factory workers do, Germany has a large trade surplus. It hasn’t lost all of its factory jobs to China, Poland or Greece. Instead, German corporations send the low-skilled jobs to low-cost areas like India and South Carolina, and keep the good jobs at home.

Germany proves that you can compete globally and still pay a living wage.

Trump is right: The American economy isn’t working for all of its people, especially for those in small cities and rural areas that once had thriving manufacturing operations.

But Trump’s prescription for that ailment is misguided. Rather than punishing China and Mexico as a roundabout way of helping Americans, a more direct approach would be better: Give workers more power in their lives.