Reshoring Manufacturing Would Be Great, But Can We All Agree that “the U.S. Lacks Skilled Workers” Isn’t a Credible Excuse Not To?

by Frank Gibson, CEO and Interim Chairman of the Board of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center

We continue to hear conflicting reasons why employers are reluctant to reshore manufacturing to the United States. Reshoring represents an opportunity to reset the relationship between manufacturing employers and workers, which has been under escalating disruption the last 3-4 decades.

The belabored reason used why some manufacturers are reluctant to return is the same one used for why they left: “they just couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed here in the United States.” It lacks credibility since from the moment U.S. Firms were offshoring manufacturing, manufacturers from around the world were moving in and didn’t seem to have trouble finding workers.

One credible reason manufacturers moved offshore is that the importing country of their goods required them to build and maintain a local plant – often with technology transfer, local ownership and local labor requirements. The tradeoff to the U.S. manufacturer might be usually lower wage rates and looser regulatory regimes which, for years, let producers produce and export to the U.S. the same product made cheaper, raising profits. U.S. manufacturers were willing to trade off U.S. jobs for broader market opportunities, lower wage costs and increased profit margins.

The Covid-19 Pandemic exposed weakness and risk in supply chains, and lately with the growing global geopolitical risks to shipping and uncertain tariffs, there is a movement of manufacturing nearer to the U.S., still seeking lower wage rates than the U.S. can reasonably offer  and looser regulations. So, one would think manufacturers moving their operations back to United States would need some incentives, but can they be balanced with the worker’s need for a livable wage and opportunities for advancement?

When manufacturers move their operations overseas, a red herring that was floated was that “manufacturers just couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed.” It seemed more like they were really saying that they “couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed who would work at a reduced wage, less safe working environment and less benefits.” That’s at least the sentiment of many workers and community leaders in the United States.

Now that discussion circles around tariffs “intended to drive manufacturers back to the U. S.” or foreign producers to set up plants in the U. S., we are hearing the same complaint from those reluctant to reshore. This time, though, it is  coupled with a new threat: the threat that AI can replace every job in time. It is no wonder workers are skeptical of their futures,, with around 52% of workers survied feeling “hopeful about the future of work, and around a third feeling depressed.” 

Neither are true. The U.S. has an enormous amount of vital, available labor. Employers have been on a path for decades of reducing their training budgets and training staff – erroneously projecting the responsibility and burden of preparing fully skilled, plug-n-play workers on educational institutions. That has never been their role and the cost for public institutions to train employer-specific workers on employer-specific tasks, unique only to their facility, is not only improbable, it is unimaginable.

As of August, 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank estimated workers available in the United States as:

Total Unemployed Plus Discouraged Workers Plus Marginally Employed – 5%

Not in Workforce – Want a Job Now – 6,100,000

Not in Labor Force – Want a Job Now, Marginally Attached, Discouraged Workers – 500,000

(Courtesy of FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) – 8-1-25)

This does not include the wave of laid-off federal workers due to DOGE cuts, and the corresponding wave of laid-off state and local workers due to federal budget cuts that rescinded previously allocated funds for state and local-run programs. Then there are the coming laid-off workers from contractors, federal laboratories and agencies, the local coffee shops and restaurants and stores. No amount of re-education alone will be enough to relocate these workers; the manufacturing employer will have to play an active role in training workers beyond core and general skills if they want the workforce they say they need. But this is not new. Employers have always been vital to building and maintaining a strong, vibrant, “nimble” and self-sufficient workforce.

Educational institutions do their best work when they develop potential workers with a strong relevant core skill and general skill base. It has always been the employer’s responsibility to develop the skills workers needed to perform their specific tasks, using their specific equipment, to their specific designs and specifications. Adult and technical education, workforce development agencies, career centers and even higher education spent many lost decades, spending enormous amounts of money and resources, trying new ways to deliver a ‘skilled worker,” but employers were never satisfied and neither were the workers who completed the programs, enhancing their skills as employers requested, to find jobs with lower wages and benefits than expected. Many graduates found that the job they were targeting evaporating while they were taking classes.

Education developing a “mission-ready” worker is an impossible task anyway, since education still doesn’t receive current and accurate job information to attempt to update curriculum for every job classification. Besides, even if they could, there is absolutely no guarantee the employer will keep those jobs available by the time someone finishes the program. The lead time for curriculum updates is 2-3 years at best, a typical program takes 2 years to complete (not counting front-end remedial work). Still education tried to satisfy the employer not realizing that it never could since the request was disingenuous.

Employers have the location, the need, the equipment, and the informal on-the-job trainers. Employers can be, should be and are needed to be the developers of their own skilled labor. Educational institutions lay the core and general skill development in the most accurate way for the targeted job, and employers continue with on-the-job training to quickly incorporate that foundational set of skills (before they degrade) into the performance of required tasks. Employers need to transition from informal worker development to structured, deliberate and documented worker development and before you know it, this begins to look like an effortless structured apprenticeship, whether registered or not.  Everyone wins: the worker who increases value with every task mastered, remains engaged and has reason and means to continually self-improve; employers who see dramatic increases in worker capacity, work quality, work quantity and compliance; educational institutions that have focused their role in workforce development; and the community that benefits from a local workforce that never stops contributing economically.

A barrier U.S. manufacturers need to overcome is that, over last few decades, manufacturing accounting departments have been forced by overzealous investors to strictly classify workers as a “cost,” so anything invested to develop the workers is a cost as well. This is a very foolish short-term strategy that might make a balance sheet look healthy, but jeopardizes the long-term efficiencies and productivities of workers, and clouds the future and purpose of the operation and its commitment to the community.

The solution is a simple one: manufacturers work with educational institutions to produce candidates with a better core and general skill foundation, then assume their role to quickly and deliberately train workers to “full job mastery” and manage that level for change, increasing wage and benefits proportional to the rise in worker value to retain them. This alone makes common business sense, documented as a value proposition. But solving so many human resources-related issues by simply shoring up something already being done but not efficiently and effectively, makes even more sense. Workers are an investment like any other capital asset used in production, not a variable cost. 

Sure, AI will replace some tasks of some jobs that are strictly knowledge-based. To go any farther than that requires expensive outlays of cash to build the hardware and automation infrastructure to apply it to the performance of units of work manufacturers need done. These tasks are subject to change, too, and would now require expensive upgrades in software and hardware. Instead of doing that, I suggest we return to reality and assume neglected roles and responsibilities.

Employers are already paying for informal on-the-job training, which comes in many forms and many levels of effectiveness. Acknowledging workers are assets and investments should drive employers to set-up deliberate, structured, and documented on the job training around the informal training and ensure every worker is driven to master the entire job, full capacity and maximized return on worker investment. Doing this before deciding if one needs to automate or experiment with AI is the far less expensive route with the highest probability of success, based on historical fact and a known outcome, and the threats of cyber-intrusion and intellectual property theft are avoided.

I hope we can change the narrative from “we can’t find the skilled workers we need“  to “we need to do a better job of training skill workers so they want to stay, thrive and be very effective and productive.“ That includes supervisors who are often placed in the same development black hole; having received very little to no task-specific training for the supervisory role, but are also asked to lead workers in the same boat. How it even works in that state is a mystery…until it doesn’t work anymore.

Frank Gibson can be contacted through the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership website.