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President Donald Trump followed through this week on a sweeping tariff policy that’s set to slap levies ranging from 10% to 50% on just about everything: Vietnam-made Nike Inc. footwear; electronics from Taiwan and South Korea; apparel from Cambodia; European wine and cheese — but also any goods that might theoretically come from the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands in the sub-Antartica Indian Ocean and Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny self-governing French archipelago off of Canada. 

It’s the most aggressive assault on free trade in a century and threatens to upend economies across the globe, with only Canadian and Mexican imports being spared additional across-the-board rates for now because those countries are engaged in their own battle over separate tariffs. 

In theory, Trump is trying to force a revitalization of American manufacturing. The reality risks being quite different. It takes years to reorder supply chains and construct new factories, while Trump’s import taxes are poised to spur almost immediate price increases, deepen a pullback in investment and weigh on global growth. In the wake of the tariff announcement, economists and market strategists have increasingly been sounding the alarm on the risk of a recession or worse, stagflation — a dangerous combination of rising prices, sluggish economic growth and high unemployment that limits the ability of the Federal Reserve to respond. 

Read more: Economic Warning Signs Get Harder to Ignore

But say that the tariff gamble does somehow succeed and manufacturers decide to build scores of new factories in the US — where are they going to find the people to work in them?

In the first quarter, company respondents to the National Association of Manufacturers’ outlook survey ranked trade uncertainties and increased raw material costs as the biggest challenges affecting their business. But nearly half also said attracting and retaining a quality workforce remained a top issue. US manufacturers have long struggled to overturn the incorrect perception of factory work as dirty, dangerous and less prestigious because it typically doesn’t require a college degree. This fight for talent has been exacerbated by increased competition from the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and the growth of the gig economy, which promises more flexible schedules.

“The American worker doesn’t need protection; it needs a government that says, ‘Boy, what you do is important and we need to give you the skills,’” Nicholas Pinchuk, chief executive officer of Snap-on Inc., which sells tools used by automotive mechanics, said in a February interview. “On-shoring is a good idea” but manufacturers can’t find enough people to fill the jobs at the US factories they have now, he said.

There were 482,000 job openings in the manufacturing sector as of February, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CEOs of companies including pool-pump maker Pentair Plc, air-conditioner company Lennox International Inc., toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker Inc. and semiconductor equipment manufacturer MKS Instruments Inc. have said they invested in Mexico because it is so difficult to find labor in the US.

Blanket-maker Faribault Mill traces its roots back to 1865 and is the longest standing manufacturer in Minnesota, according to CEO Ross Widmoyer. He’s passionate about US manufacturing and dedicated to keeping the company’s products American-made, but “it’s a hard business,” Widmoyer says. “That’s why there aren’t a lot of people doing it.” Faribault’s longstanding presence in Minnesota has been helpful for building and maintaining a workforce but it still has to get creative to fill job openings. An advertisement for a weaver isn’t going to get many takers, Widmoyer said. “There’s a real challenge in this country of trying to convince people that manufacturing is indeed cool and you can make a career out of it,” he said. 

To help incentivize more people to choose factory careers, manufacturers have been pushing for years to expand the government’s Pell Grant program to include more short-term job-based training. Pell Grants, which provide need-based financial aid for higher education that doesn’t have to be repaid in most circumstances, can currently be used for technical training, but the programs must be at least 600 hours over 15 weeks to qualify. Federal loans are available for programs of more than 300 hours but all aid is limited to for-credit courses, according to the Urban Institute, meaning shorter-term certificate-based technical training for in-demand fields such as commercial driving, cybersecurity and welding are excluded.  

Read more: Regrading Success for Community Colleges

The industrial sector’s plea for a revamp has largely fallen on deaf ears, with several Congressional efforts to expand the program going nowhere. There’s been no indication so far that this is a priority for the Trump administration. On the contrary, even without any expansions, the Pell Grant program will face a $2.7 billion funding shortfall entering the next fiscal year, with that deficit on track to grow to more than $10 billion over the course of fiscal 2026 and nearly $50 billion by 2030, according to January projections from the Congressional Budget Office. 

“The United States probably has something to learn from certain countries in Europe about apprenticeship and skills training. We over-index societally here in investing our capital into secondary education and degree programs and oftentimes flushing it down the toilet in the process,” John Stankey, CEO of AT&T Inc., said at an event this week co-hosted by the Business Roundtable focused on second chance hiring programs that aim to increase employment opportunities for people with criminal records. A more rigorous approach to incentivizing trade skill development and shifting society’s definition of success “would be a good reorientation of our mindset,” Stankey added. 

Read more: China Tells Kids to Study Manufacturing to Fill Factory Jobs

In the absence of a stronger government push to bolster factory employment, companies have tried just about everything they can think of to both attract and keep workers in manufacturing careers. That includes strengthening relationships with local community colleges, technical schools and high schools; developing their own training programs for skills like welding and roofing; experimenting with part-time schedules to lure people looking for more flexibility; constructing on-site day-care facilities; and exempting marijuana from drug testing. They have also been adjusting their recruitment practices to hire more people with a criminal record.

The Second Chance Business Coalition, co-chaired by JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon and Eaton Corp. CEO Craig Arnold, launched in 2021 with the goal of helping companies develop best practices for tapping into this labor pool. The population of Americans with a criminal record is pegged at 70 million to 100 million — or about one in three US adults, according to the nonprofit Sentencing Project. “It's a waiting workforce,” Tim Berry, JPMorgan’s global head of corporate responsibility and chairman of the mid-Atlantic region, said at the event this week. “Our company would be making a huge mistake if we let this talent pool sit on the sidelines.”

The coalition has swelled to more than 50 companies, with water-technology manufacturer Xylem Inc. and food distributor KeHE the latest to sign on. Other members include General Motors Co., American Airlines Group Inc. and railroad Union Pacific Corp. JPMorgan says it’s hired more than 21,000 people with criminal records over the past five years, while about 8% of the people hired each year by Radius Recycling Inc., a steel scrap processing company, are second chance candidates, according to CEO Tamara Lundgren. “The labor pool that we needed to do our business” was shrinking, Lundgren said. “So we needed to find more avenues to recruit talent.” 

Read more: Manufacturers Are Spending, Not Reshoring

For all of manufacturers’ efforts to beef up the pipeline of skilled workers, there’s a reason why automation and robotics companies are so confident that the push to bring manufacturing work back to the US will be a long-term boon for their business. Beyond a dearth of available workers and the challenges of rebuilding that pipeline, the cost of shifting supply chains to the US will be significant and companies will seek to mitigate that expense as much as they can with technology.

Still, there are limits to what robots can do. Delta Air Lines Inc. has a trio of robots at its Atlanta-based kitchen that preps meals for domestic flights, including the recently launched Shake Shack Inc. burger. The whirring arms pick up trays, place side dishes and deposit salt and pepper packets. But there’s a human at the end of the assembly line to add the butter packets. The robots squeeze the package too hard. 

Read more: Shake Shack in First Class Is Latest Lure for Wealthier Fliers

It’s a telling example that underscores the pitfalls of Trump’s high-stakes tariff game. American factories still need American workers. But these aren’t fields of dreams: If companies build them, there’s no guarantee the workers will come. 

Even before Trump’s tariff announcement, there were signs that all of the uncertainty his trade policy has introduced is already weighing on the manufacturing sector. US factory activity slipped back into contraction territory last month as an index of orders slumped to the lowest level since May 2023 and a measure of prices climbed to the highest since June 2022, according to the Institute for Supply Management. The benchmark gauge had finally signaled expansion at the start of the year after the longest stretch of weak demand on record, but tariffs risk jeopardizing that fragile recovery. The outlook for industrial capital spending is deteriorating and the probability of a recession is higher because of the tariff shock, Barclays Plc analyst Julian Mitchell wrote in a note this week. 

Siemens AG agreed to acquire Dotmatics, which ma