Unions, Not Just Factories, Will Make America Great

President Donald Trump and his defenders claim that his recent tariffs will usher in “a new Golden Age of American industrialization and prosperity.” As the president put it, “tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs. They’re about protecting the soul of our country.”

But there are two major flaws in this vision of a prosperous, re-industrialized America. First, US factory jobs only became synonymous with middle-class prosperity because of mass unionization. Being pro-factory is not the same thing as being pro-worker.

And, second, even if these tariffs do ultimately help encourage domestic manufacturing — and that’s a very big if — structural factors like automation put a hard cap on the number of total manufacturing jobs that could return. Strengthening US manufacturing is a worthwhile goal, but factory jobs for all is a mirage. To recreate American prosperity, we need unions for all.

Without Unions, Factory Jobs Aren’t Great

Trump and his acolytes want us to forget that factories were horrific places to work until unionization drives in the first decades of the Twentieth century introduced some modicum of security, safety, and industrial democracy. William Blake was right to describe early factories as “dark satanic mills.” For anybody needing a refresher on what exactly this looked like, grab a copy of Upton Sinclair’s 1905 exposé The Jungle, written during the very same Gilded Age that Trump explicitly wants us to return to.

But you don’t need examples from the distant past to get a sense of what types of manufacturing jobs Trump would reintroduce. Just look at the South today, the one region of the country where manufacturing jobs have continued to grow.

Far from being bastions of security like in the 1950s, these jobs are unsafe, precarious, and relatively low-paid, especially for part-time and temporary workers. Due to the proliferation of non-union manufacturing jobs in the US South, one-third of all American manufacturing production workers now rely on food stamps or other federal assistance programs to get by. As policy analyst Matt Bruenig points out, McDonald’s workers in Denmark make more than Honda workers in Alabama.

Non-union manufacturing jobs also tend to be very dangerous. A 2023 academic study found that up to one in five manufacturing workers in Mississippi and Alabama had been injured on the job — a rate nearly four times higher than the national factory average. As one Bloomberg report notes, ...