The US already makes highly advanced goods like cars using robotic manufacturing.
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
The question really is if such entrepreneur made such a shoe factory that still employed union labor at fairly high rates of pay, why wouldn't they just install that factory in a place where labor costs less?
If the goal is union jobs at fairly high rates of pay, we can make high-productivity jobs like CVS employee (~$1.2mm revenue per employee IIRC) into good high-paying union jobs by incentivizing CVS employees to unionize.
Even the type of high-value manufacturing present in the US tends to be less productive with labor than Costco (~$30k net profit per employee) or Delta (~$56k net per employee) or ADP (~$84k net). Since our labor pool is decreasing, it is even more critical for Americans to work in high-productivity jobs rather than moving the other direction.
Clothing is hard because it needs to have stretch. Iron is easy to automate because it doesn't stretch (well it does but not by enough to worry about). Thus we have been automating steel for a long time, and clothing still has a lot of manual sewing done on it. To the extent we have automated sewing it is often has a significant quality reduction.
Hopefully somebody can solve the problem. There is a lot of work on it, and progress is being made. Don't ask me how close they are, I don't work in that space.
and one of the ways to do that effectively is with intense automation and integrated supply chains regardless of geo-political borders. Neither of these is attractive to this circus
Why would an entrepreneur even think about building a factory when building materials might potentially skyrocket? Anyone who is considering something like this is just going to wait until Trump isn't in office so things can stabilize. If you said, right now, I'm gonna build a factory, it probably wouldn't start producing anything until 2028 at best.
What? Of all the non-high-tech things you can manufacture, shoes actually seem pretty complicated. You have a mix of different materials, if you want to go more traditional you need a higher level of employee skill, you need a big variety of styles and sizes to be competitive, and if people have one bad experience with your product they'll probably never buy from you again. Also the margins and competition are brutal.
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?