The Dire Shortage of Actual American Workers
by Jeffrey A. Tucker, The Epoch Times.com, June 25, 2025
Commentary
I have predicted many times that the hope of restoring American manufacturing would ultimately falter on unforeseen grounds. Namely, there simply aren’t enough working-age people in the United States who know how to do stuff, care enough to do it, have the work ethic or mental discipline to make it through one full day’s work, or otherwise feel the inspiration to make themselves useful.
Does that sound crazy? Well, the facts are these. There are 400,000 open factory and warehouse jobs today, and precious few people out there with the requisite training or ambition to take them. The jobs pay well. They are good jobs. But American workers have different expectations; namely, they want to make the big bucks while doing nothing.
They are mostly not prepared to enter a world of serious manufacturing. They have prepared for everything but that, having lived with the expectation that their college degrees will magically confer status on them sufficient to generate a big income stream forever. Now they are waking up to a new reality. They need skills they do not have and they lack the ambition to acquire them.
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Does that sound harsh? The truth needs to be told. There are too many layabouts in the workforce who wave fake credentials for which they paid the big bucks—or borrowed the big bucks—but trained them for nothing at all. What they are mostly trained to do is fake out their professors, scroll social media, vamp and preen for cameras, talk the talk, use substances, and careen from one day to the next living off family or government, without a lick of skill or inspiration or drive.
Anyone who runs a business knows the score. There simply are not enough skilled workers out there. The fakes outnumber the real by 20 to 1. I said that number to a person experienced in the financial industry and he corrected me: 100 to 1. Maybe that’s correct.
I’ve done job interviews for years for nonprofit and for-profit companies. It’s the most frustrating job there is. Finding people who can speak plain English without nasally vocal fries, rising intonation, or street talk peppered with fashionable gibberish is enough of a challenge. It gets worse when you take apart what they are saying. They demand more time off, vacation days, health benefits, and more, long before they know anything about the job.
Americans have been trained to believe that a job is not a task but a paycheck, not an applied skill at achieving something but a racket, not a discipline to produce but a welfare state to plug the holes in the streams of income in and out. These people are poor by any standard, often buying groceries on instant credit, sitting on maxed out credit cards, borrowing from friends and family, scamming the unemployment office, and so on, but have no burning desire to upgrade to live a real life.
The Trump administration has made it a priority in its new budgets to fund actual training programs. The ambition to change this problem is all there. There is some much-welcome new emphasis on internships, shop classes, work/study programs, and apprenticeship programs.Watch Mike Rowe Explain How President Trump Should Invest in Creating a New Work Force Through Trade Schools
But getting people to sign up for these programs is a problem of its own. If a generation or three doesn’t want to take a factory or warehouse job, it’s hard to know why the same people would sign up to train to take such a job. Credential-waving bums don’t want to do anything.
This is not the American way. You cannot Make America Great Again with a nation of gamers and social-media influencers. You need people who actually do stuff! This has always been a flaw in the plan to bring back manufacturing to U.S. shores. It’s one thing to create the jobs; it’s another to find people to fill them. It’s the latter issue that is foiling the plan so far.
Let’s revisit a bit of history to see how we got here.
In 1936, faced with high unemployment, FDR hatched an invidious plan to game the bad numbers. He signed legislation that took millions out of the workforce. The claim was that he was banning child labor but that was baloney. He was eliminating entry-level jobs for U.S. teens. No more could you get a normal job at 12 or 13 (as I did, under the table) but rather had to wait until the age of 16 (because too many regulations governed the 14 and 15-year-olds).There were exceptions written into the law for family businesses, agriculture, and for Hollywood child stars like Shirley Temple, but essentially this one move killed youth work for a generation. It also kicked off a decline in work ethic. After all, if the kids never encounter a day’s work before the age of 18 or 22, they have no history of learning or experience to serve as the foundation of life expectations. In truth, that law was a disaster that gradually created a nation of layabouts.
The wartime draft in 1940 gave them a job anyway and the military raised them to be disciplined and caring, hence “the Greatest Generation.” But once the war was over, the nation had a huge problem. Kids were stuck in school rather than learning the ways of the work world. Sure enough, the first generation of lounge lizards hatched the hippie movement and the drug culture, consistent with the old rule that “Idle hands do the devil’s work.”
The second problem presented itself in the form of the G.I. Bill. The purpose of these postwar college grants was to keep the labor markets from being flooded after the war. It was not compassion. It was not professional aspiration. It was an attempt to restrict labor supply to keep wages and salaries high and stop a flood of new workers. You could say that it worked for that purpose. It kept newly returning soldiers off the job market.
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But it had the consequence of utterly changing American expectations for college. College used to be for intellectuals, including lawyers, not trades. But once college got into training for business and commercial life, there was a problem. These institutions were terrible at it. Still are. So instead, they invented a huge range of fake degrees that led generations to believe that upon graduation, they would get fancy jobs. The degrees were in marketing, communication, business, or whatever, and eventually became credentials that are even more absurd, such as women’s studies or black history or some other peculiar degree. The only job these degrees support is a ballooning sector of Karens working in HR departments.
Third, the problem worsened in the 21st century with zero interest rates that addicted the corporate sector to living on high leverage, expanding their workforces far beyond what was economically rational. The professional class of mouse jigglers and latte swillers became deeply institutionalized, and their idle hands did even more devil’s work. These fake “intellectuals” swarmed through media, government, and the corporate sector, acculturated to believe that all of life consists of faking it, playing office politics, and throwing one’s weight around.
This sweet gig could not last forever. Once the Fed got its act together and raised rates, the professional class of managers underwent a culling that is still going on today. Look at any industry today that is cutting jobs and you can be sure that they are all from the bloated sector of management and none from the customer-facing jobs.
This long history created a highly strange situation in which the people who do the least get paid the most, whilst the hardest workers who actually face customers, cut meat, repair cars, or work the factory floor get paid the least. This is completely unjust and unsustainable. It’s not going to be easy to change this. There is no switch available in legislation that can convert a labor population accustomed to living a lie into one in which people do disciplined work and are rewarded for it.
That change is going to take an entire generation or two. There are no easy answers. It can happen but it will take some time.
