I don't think that line of thinking is entirely BS. There is some credence to it...
For a frame of reference as to my "street cred" on the subject, I am currently a Sr Project Manager on a Corporate Engineering team. Started life after the Army as a millwright apprentice, broke out a journeyman 4 yrs later, went on to get a state electrician license, structural, pipe, and pressure vessel welding certs, began working on controls and PLCs, got into machine design work, and somewhere down the road ended up as a foreman, supervisor, manager, etc.
I've worked on every major kind of manufacturing equipment in various industries - graphite, heavy industry, food processing, appliance, automotive, plastic and resin processing handling, paper manufacturing, material handling, etc.
Now I manage plant turnarounds and major capital installations globally - in 2014 & 2015 I built a greenfield plant in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and in years following have decommissioned sites in Canada, Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria, and the US. I've managed equipment installations and plants in China, Singapore, and countless other countries in that neck of the woods.
For a brief period of time, I have been a plant manager and manufacturing director as well but prefer to stay on the engineering side of the equation.
I am the guy they send into a plant when everything is burning down and bleeding cash. I evaluate everything from financial performance down the GL account level to identify critical inputs and cost drivers, to maintenance, engineering, and facility systems. I identify weakness in the entire plant and drop them into 3 primary buckets - people, process, and equipment. I drill down further to determine root cause of system failures and develop a corrective action plan to return the site to profitability. 90+% of the time, the issues are identified as poor morale of the operations employees (production and maintenance) due to a lack of effective plant management, both at the department and site level. So at times, I am the ax man as well. I lay out a personal improvement plant to various leaders in the company, give them a period of time to self-correct, and then when they fail to pass muster, I send them packing. This typically results in me being asked to run the operation in the interim (typically 4-6 months), solicit applicants (both internal and external), select a management team for the site, hire them, and lay out the plan of action for a new management team.
We are a company with over 249 manufacturing sites globally and have a foot print on every continent. So my area of responsibility is wide ranging and I never know where I will end up each month.
I said all that to say this - having worked in every country in the western world and some in the far east and middle east, there is a change happening in manufacturing. It is happening in corporate offices and headquarters from Zurich, Switzerland to Chicago, New York, Dallas, Charlotte, and every other major corporate hub. Tariffs that have been in place and the requirements surrounding both USMCA and the new China trade deal. Where components are sourced, produced, manufactured, assembled, and sold are all being impacted by these deals, some negative and some positive impacts.
- The positive impacts are for the employees - wages are now competitive as the employee now has opportunity to jump ship for greener pastures like never before. This also forces companies to improve the benefits, work schedules, etc.
- The negative impacts have primarily hit the companies - raw materials for the product being produced and sold have increased in price if being sourced OCONUS, which has also translated into a more diversified supply chain and returning some manufacturing to the US, which is then translated in additional job growth, which again increases the opportunity of the employee even further. It is what we refer to as a circular argument or self fulfilling prophesy.
So yes, there is some credence to these trade deals having a drastic impact on the US and European business model, which in turn is benefitting the unemployment sector and the countries these company reside in.
To believe otherwise is contrary to the evidence I have witnessed in every boardroom I have sat in over the last 10 years...
