Manufacturing's Unbreakable Mandate

February 1, 2026

You can learn a lot from the picture above. Note the absence of a sewn in label. Someone figured out that screening the information on the garment saved an operation, and if you’re manufacturing something mostly made by hand, that is a victory. It saves an “operation.” That is what people who sit behind sewing machines are called: “operators.”

I’m pointing this out because even this small step shows the lengths a manufacturer of a product will go to strip the labor content out of a product.

Also note this garment comes from India. The production of undergarments over the course of my life has gone from New York City (hard to believe, but there were once cut and sew operations in Midtown, steps away from Macy’s Herald Square) to Eastern Pennsylvania, to the Carolinas, and then offshore, first to Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and once China opened up, the Mainland.

China is now wealthy enough to discard low skill work like sewing to places like India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. The sewing machine, from its invention by Isaac Singer, was the launch point for mass industrialization and the growth of prosperity for all of the above named nations into technocratic powerhouses. And this pursuit of industrialization follows one path for the manufacturer: “Where can I find or create the cheapest labor cost input?”

This mandate can be duplicated for hundreds of industries.

In this example, you can see how eliminating the cost input from labor as well as the raw cost of that labor drives the production outcome. Why is this important?

It’s important because the conversation this country is having about “making things here” is being viewed and twisted into a context that doesn’t fit reality.

Labor cost arbitrage has always been a factor in manufacturing. We did it domestically, as per the example above, and it was done globally. It’s not a conspiracy, no one was “sold out,” because even before tariffs were eased there was no way to bridge the labor gap between a First World country and a Third World one. Developing countries would, in fact, develop.

So the WTO didn’t start deindustrialization. The real fallout comes from the fact it accelerated it, and it did it at a vicious pace.

Years ago, I was a textile buyer for a women’s sportswear firm. And I bailed on the business voluntarily partly because I saw the handwriting on the wall well before China joined the WTO.

You'll note the industry is already shedding jobs from imports even with tariffs in place. That's because the labor cost gap can't be bridged even with tariffs. 

Textile employee count, 1990 to the Present

I remember walking to Penn Station with my head of production and saw a child’s garment set in the window of a store on Seventh Avenue. The total cost of the set was less than the cost of our labor alone. (Part of this is due to the fact that the union’s health insurance, listed as “H&W” or health and welfare, was added to the cost of the garment, so the lack of a public health care system really puts U.S. manufacturing at a disadvantage. This is another story for another day.)

This incident predates the entry of China into the WTO, when there were restricted import quotas in place for specific categories. For the apparel industry specifically, there was also the Multi Fiber Agreement, where there were 16 categories for denim alone and 41 categories for yarns, to give just two examples. Imagine the enforcement bureaucracy needed to oversee this, or the opportunities for certain businesses with access to get more favorable treatment than competitors.

The quota system itself was interesting in its application. An overseas manufacturer could “buy quota” before production and not manufacture anything, selling it later if supply got tight, almost as if it were a call option on a stock. Then as now, transhipping to Vietnam was common. 

But the delusion people have about “reshoring” is that we’ll set the clock back to 1957, when all was wonderful and everyone was flourishing. (Well, not really, we needed a War on Poverty to alleviate that.)

But as I noted during the Obama years, all onshoring means is bringing back the means of production without the workforce to go with it. And for industries that never even left, here’s a quote from a recent Bloomberg article:

“Domestic oil production has been surging, but oil and gas jobs in the U.S. have yet to recover from massive losses over the past decade — and they may not ever, Bloomberg reports. The industry as a whole has shed around 40% of its workforce since 2014, and the combination of automation, improved drilling techniques, acquisitions activity in the sector is making a full rebound look unlikely. "We’re likely to see a very different oil and gas industry" with "far fewer jobs," says one expert.”

The same is true of the auto industry. It takes far less in manpower to build a car, with most of the assembly built with automation.

What is amazing to this observer, who walked into his first factory at the age of five, is that some economists are taking what is little more than Volkische Kitsch as a serious policy tool. This country is pathologically in love with the idea of the “factory floor.” Billy Joel wrote “Allentown” in the Year of Our Lord 1982. Bruce Springsteen wrote “My Home Town” a year later:

“Seems like there ain't nobody Wants to come down here no more. They're closing down the textile mill Across the railroad tracks. Foreman says, "These jobs are going, boys, And they ain't coming back. To your hometown”

Springsteen mentioned in his Netflix special that he had never set foot in a factory in his entire life. And most textile mills wouldn’t even begin closing their doors until a decade later.

But, Springsteen is a poet, and the romance of the grit and the noise and the grime is an emotional pull, for him, and millions of Americans. It ain’t coming back. And who would want it?

There are other examples of domestic industries made redundant even without imports, in the way websites like Orbitz obliterated the travel agency industry. To those under the age of forty, when you wanted to book a flight, you called your local travel agent who rattled off options, prices and departure times while you furiously scribbled all this out on a yellow legal pad. This was especially hard in New York with a choice of three airports. Now you logged on, sorted the flights by date and price, clicked, and you were done. It took less than two years to vaporize the industry. Tariffs aren’t bringing those jobs back.

And even “modern” industries, like software and coding, can go boom and bust in the wink of an eye. And with AI tools being deployed, a lot of people in this field are going to have to reskill themselves.

Software Job Posting on Indeed 2020 to the Present

So scapegoating offshoring and believing that the shape of the workforce will "return" to the glory of the old days is little more than a fantasy. The workforce is always in flux, and thanks to technology, very dynamic. 

The point of all this history is to underscore the fact that the mission of production is to shrink costs by any means necessary, and it’s been that way since the 19th Century. Tariffs will be ineffective in onshoring and despite a few loud press releases about some new plant in Ohio or Virginia or Colorado, the calculus won’t change. 

Now some of this is beneficial. Siting a plant domestically provides some tax revenue for the local municipality and state, and you get some supply chain spillover, since these plants need to be maintained. And since the pandemic, our thinking about the atomization of the supply chain has certainly changed. But don't expect anything near a great economic transition. 

Americans have got to get off their addiction to grievance and nostalgia and start looking forward. The past is a foreign country. In fact, it’s already moved there and its not relocating again. And they need to internalize that even if offshoring hadn't occurred, the shape of the labor force would have still undergone tortuous changes. 

The other thing people have to come to terms with is the hard lesson I learned. I had to reskill myself three times after I left the apparel trade. When I look back at those days and the years I spent in it, it’s only now that I realize I didn't know how much I knew when I knew it. All of that had to be scrapped. 

So take this advice: No matter if the career trajectory is made for you or by you, when and if that sh*t hits your desk, you’re the only one whose going to have to deal with it. Industrial policy won’t save you, or the country.