It used to be that the low end jobs we have today were for teenagers or people trying to pay through college, but too often than not you see someone in their 30s or 40s working at walmart or mcdonalds and it breaks my heart, im sure these people would gladly go work in a factory to gain a livable wage.
Man, I agree with you completely, what you said is real as hell and honestly heartbreaking
A lot of people don’t get how the service economy leaves so many behind, especially folks who can’t afford getting degrees and getting in debt just so they can get jobs where they make $25/hr making sales calls, drafting presentations, or reading dashboards at an office job for a multinational.
And yeah you’re right, factory jobs used to be the great equalizer; you didn’t need a degree, just show up, work hard, you could support a family, own a house, maybe retire without drowning in debt. I totally get why people would want that back.
But here’s the shitty reality, even if we bring some of that manufacturing back, the jobs won’t look like they used to. Factories today run on automation, sensors, robotics, and predictive software; so the second a company can afford to replace a person with a machine, they will with no hesitation. It’s not personal, it’s just the way the system optimizes itself.
You might get a short-term labor boom from reshoring, but without a national policy to intentionally preserve human labor roles or slow automation (which no one is seriously proposing), it’s a temporary fix on a long-term decline.
Unless we start deliberately designing policy to preserve human labor in production, most of those jobs get automated out sooner than later.
This whole economic system has evolved into something that doesn’t care about people anymore, only throughput and efficiency, that’s the real tragedy.