Donald Trump Wants His Backers to Have Lousy Jobs

There has almost certainly never been a president who has moved so rapidly to screw the people who put him in office. While Trump lost among more educated voters, he won a solid majority among workers without college degrees and especially white workers without college degrees.

Ordinarily a politician looks to reward their backers. Trump has certainly done plenty to reward his big contributors, and surely will do much more, but he seems to being doing everything possible to harm the moderate and middle-income workers who backed him in large numbers.

This started with things like trying to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which cracks down on banks, credit companies, insurers and others ripping off their customers. We also have the efforts of DOGE to eliminate the I.R.S.’s Direct File program, a system that makes it cheap and easy for ordinary workers to file their tax returns. Trump, along with his co-president Elon Musk, are trying to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that protects workers’ right to form unions.

Then we have Donald Trump’s plan to whack ordinary people with massive import taxes, which he announced on April 2^nd, which he also called “Liberation Day.” Trump’s allies in Congress want to use the money from Trump’s import taxes, together with massive cuts to Medicaid, which also disproportionately benefits moderate-income voters, to offset the lost revenue for big tax cuts to the rich.

But Trump has a truly Trumpian story that he is telling his backers to justify it all. He promised to bring back manufacturing jobs by having more goods produced in America. There are plenty of problems with this plan, as Jared Bernstein and I outlined in a column a few weeks back. It is very unlikely he will be able to regain a large number of manufacturing jobs. Even if we eliminated the trade deficit completely, the share of manufacturing in total employment would just rise from 8.0 percent to 9.0 percent.

But the story gets even worse. If we go back fifty years, manufacturing were good jobs, offering higher pay and benefits than most other jobs in the economy. This was especially true for workers without college degrees, who often could support a family and put kids through college on the wages they earned in manufacturing jobs. (This is mostly a story about men, as readers likely recognize.)

But the reason manufacturing jobs were good jobs half a century ago is that they were disproportionately union jobs. Roughly a third of manufacturing workers were in unions, compared to just 15 percent for the rest of the private sector. This is no longer the case. At present, only 8.0 percent of manufacturing workers are in unions, only slightly higher than the 6.0 percent for the rest of the private labor force. As a result, manufacturing jobs are no longer especially good jobs.

If we just look at production and non-supervisory workers, a category that covers 80 percent of the workforce, but excludes supervisors and high-end professional workers, the average hourly wage for workers in manufacturing in 2024 was $27.78 an hour. That is almost 8.0 percent less than the $30.13 average for all production and non-supervisory workers. This is not a full comparison. We would have to consider benefits, as well as controlling for factors like education, location, and gender to do a full comparison. But it is unlikely that even with full controls we would find that manufacturing jobs paid a substantial premium compared to other jobs in the economy.

The graph below compares the hourly wage for production and supervisory workers in manufacturing with the average hourly wage in other industries.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As can be seen the pay in manufacturing is substantially lower than in several other major industries. Pay in trucking averages $29.77 an hour, more than 7.0 percent higher than the wage for manufacturing workers. FWIW, more trade likely means more workers employed in trucking. The pay for workers in utilities averages $45.37, more than 63 percent above the average pay in manufacturing.

The average pay for workers in banks averages $30.24, almost 9.0 percent above the pay in manufacturing. Note that we are excluding bank managers and professionals from this calculation, so these highly paid workers are not distorting the calculation. The average pay for workers in healthcare was $34.69 an hour, almost 25 percent higher than the average for manufacturing workers. It’s true that many of these workers have college degrees or at least some education beyond high school, but that will also be true for many workers in manufacturing who have done an apprenticeship or gone to a community college or trade school.

There are some industries where workers clearly do worse than manufacturing. The average pay in retail is just $20.94 an hour, almost 25 percent less than the pay in manufacturing. In hotels and restaurants, the average is just $19.54 an hour, almost 30 percent less than in manufacturing. Manufacturing workers are clearly doing better than workers in these industries, but manufacturing no longer stands out as an especially high-paying sector.

If the Trump deal is that moderate and middle-income workers will pay much higher taxes due to his tariffs, but will be somewhat more likely to get manufacturing jobs as a result of his “reindustrialization” strategy, it does not look like a very good one.