Will Anyone Take the Factory Jobs Trump Wants to Bring Back to America?

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By

Chao Deng

and

Te-Ping Chen

| Photographs by Ross Mantle for WSJ

May 19, 2025 5:30 am ET

Quaker City Castings employees at work.

SALEM, Ohio—At 6 a.m. every weekday, a group of sturdy-framed men in steel-toed boots clock into the small factory at Quaker City Castings to build sand molds, pour molten metal and grind iron and steel castings.

The jobs are tiring, feature hazards not found at desk jobs and are tough to fill. Once workers are recruited, it can be difficult to get them to stay. This is work politicians lionize, but Americans often don’t want.

“A lot of people say they wouldn’t work in a place like this because of how hard it is,” said Zachary Puchajda, a 25-year old worker who took up metalcasting when a friend who worked at Quaker City introduced him to it.

The work represents the type of gritty, physically demanding labor that President Trump envisions will recast the U.S. as the manufacturing powerhouse it once was.

Already, Trump’s tariffs have prompted some companies to source parts in the U.S. rather than overseas, a shift that has boosted demand for some small and midsize manufacturers.

America has nearly half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Nearly half of manufacturing companies say their biggest challenge is recruiting and retaining workers, according to a survey this year by the National Association of Manufacturers.

Manufacturers usually assign workers to shifts with rigid hours and pay 7.8% lower on average than the private sector as a whole, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1980, manufacturing wages were 3.8% higher. A decline in union representation in the sector hasn’t helped.

Factory employers face other headwinds, said Susan N. Houseman, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. These include misconceptions that all factory work is dirty and dangerous, or lingering trauma from the wave of manufacturing layoffs in the 1990s and early 2000s as factories moved abroad. “People saw what happened in their communities and may not think it’s stable employment,” Houseman said.

Carolyn Lee, president of the Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit focused on workforce development for the sector, said the labor shortage makes it challenging to scale up production on a dime. “You can’t just plop a factory down and hope people will miraculously appear,” she said.

Manufacturers will have to add in new inducements to attract workers, she said, including greater levels of scheduling flexibility that more blue-collar workers have begun to seek alongside their white-collar counterparts.

Quaker City Castings largely finds applicants through word-of-mouth, but also relies on online job advertisements.

Quaker City Castings President Dave Lordi said the manufacturer saw a brief 25% surge in orders after the tariffs. If the trend were to pick back up, he said, the company would have to add a second work shift.

Many manufacturers find worker retention can be as challenging as recruitment, and that new hires frequently quit for less taxing or better-paid employment.

Quaker City increased its average salaries by 30% since the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, “if we hire 20 people, two to three will decide to stay for a career while others will quit after a few weeks or months,” said Joseph Korff, the company’s owner.

Puchajda said he opted to work at Quaker City because it paid $2 an hour more than his previous job at a local golf club. He credits his father, a construction worker, for instilling in him the strong work ethic needed for metalcasting.

Puchajda considers himself an exception among his peers, however. “I think the main problem with kids these days is a lot of things have just been handed to them,” he said.

Finding workers with the right experience has been a challenge for Quaker City. Most roles require technical skills best learned on the job. Some tasks, like preparing a wood pattern for a mold that satisfies precise blueprint dimensions, require engineering skills.

Crews work near molten metal that can reach 3000 degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes haul heavy equipment. To protect themselves from flames and dust, workers wear hard hats, face shields and respirators.

“I’ve seen people come and quit after a few days or a few months,” said Cynthia Johler, a 36-year-old single mother who specializes in molding at Quaker City. She is one of the few women there and earned the moniker “Black Widow” after sticking out the job for three years.

Last year, Johler spent two months in a walking boot after a heavy plastic mold box fell and fractured her foot. Johler said she took the injury in stride. The medical costs and lost wages as a result of the injury were covered by the state’s workers’ compensation program into which the company pays.

“I love what I do,” she said.

At high schools in the area, where steel plants once represented the top pillar of the local economy, students, teachers and recent graduates said young people are increasingly open to trade careers.

But not all trades attract the same degree of interest. Many students are drawn to fields like construction or welding that are easier to envision, or where they already know someone, said Mike Agnew, a school counselor at Beaver Local High School.

Quaker City largely finds applicants through word-of-mouth, but also relies on online job advertisements. It is one of several manufacturing facilities in the area including an auto plant, bathroom-fixtures factory and metal fabricator.

Factory work, while plentiful, remains a tough sell for many locals. Jacob Weibush, a 25-year-old resident of Salem, took vocation classes during his high school years and tried work at a nearby plastics factory as a teenager but said he didn’t like the comparatively lower salary, lack of benefits for temp workers or the physical demands. “All the standing hurt my feet at the end of the day,” he said.

Employees at Quaker City wear protective gear when working around molten metal.

Now Weibush works at a friend’s auto shop. He works from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. making $15 an hour and said he sees himself doing it for the long haul.

Similarly, Stephen Page, a junior at West Branch High School, plans to become an electrician, a profession that he sees as offering more flexibility and freedom from confinement on a factory floor all day.

“I just picture standing on an assembly line like a cartoon, with things moving down it and everybody stamping something different,” he said.

Write to Chao Deng at chao.deng@wsj.com and Te-Ping Chen at Te-ping.Chen@wsj.com

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5727367&forum_id=2#48944835)

“Puchajda said he opted to work at Quaker City because it paid $2 an hour more than his previous job at a local golf club.”

Only $2 more?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5727367&forum_id=2#48944891)