The types of manufacturing jobs which would be a step up would be high-tech and high gross-margins manufacturing (which we already do), not whatever crap China is producing. If you want the quality of life of a Chinese manufacturing worker - which is still much worse than that of a retail worker in America - sure. There is no basis in reality that the kind of jobs Chinese manufacturers would yield a higher quality of life for a blue collar worker.

Furthermore, those kinds of jobs are not long for this world. They're inevitably going to be automated away and the replacement jobs robotics maintainers are not ever going to be in numbers great enough to replace those manufacturing jobs. It's beyond stupid especially when you consider that the labor market was already incredibly strong at ~5% unemployment.

A lot of skilled jobs were shipped of to China, particularly heavy industry.

Then the solution is targetted tariffs such as the ones they placed on BYD, not across the board tariffs.

I keep hearing this BS, but unskilled manufacturing jobs are a downgrade from unskilled service jobs, and if official statistics aren’t lying, there’s been a growing shortage of unskilled labor in service. Expecting people without a skill and can’t even bother to flip burgers to want to do heavy labor in factories is ridiculous.

So what you’re saying is, Trump fights for the poor and underprivileged.

Wait till they hear that it pays $1.50 an hour, and if they dont make 1,000 pairs of sneakers every shift they dont get paid for the month.

That's why they'll find a way to make and label more criminals to throw them in prison where they will be out to work for those minimal wages...

I don't doubt part of making America great in their minds includes bringing debtor prisons back too.

I don't believe that working on a assembly line is better than driving for Uber or delivering for Amazon.

An assembly line still gives you a path to management, and possibly insurance / healthcare and maybe a 401k or some retirement.

With gig work you get none of that.

Depends very much on the assembly line. Some are quite reasonable, especially in smaller firms where you don't have a completely detached management in their ivory tower passing efficiency edicts for grinding through disposable anonymous minions. You can't abuse your staff too much if you have to sit next to them in the canteen! It's not exactly stimulating work and obviously not a rockstar salary, but it's comfortable enough indoor work and you don't have to pee in bottles and have a psychopathic delivery schedule every day.