We go to press a few weeks after I draft my column and my editors scoff at my lack of written compositional skills. By the time you read this, maybe everything is moonlight and roses, but at this moment in mid-April, the uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policy is the center of every headline and has turned the roller coaster ride on the stock market into the best attraction in the amusement park industry.
I want to step back from commenting on the merit of the policy. HRO Today is not in the business of joining the political debate. Economically, yes raising protections against countries that raise protections against the U.S. will bring more manufacturing back to the U.S. While some may agree with that policy, and some may question it, the laws of economics hold. Change the cost models and you change the game. The U.S. has a highly educated and productive workforce. However, the trade protections that exist with some low-cost workforce countries gives those countries both the economic benefit of cheaper labor that negates the automation and productivity advantage of the U.S. workforce. To the extent I will take a position personally, trade policies have disadvantaged the American worker and they have paid the price, quite literally.
However, there needs to be more than a reckoning on trade policy. We have a workforce issue looming if there is a boom in manufacturing plant openings in the U.S. Where are we going to get all the darned people?
It sometimes feels like we need to go Washington and explain to politicians the song about the hip bone being attached to the thigh bone. The economy is a giant game of Jenga, and all of the pieces support and interact with everything else. We have a 4% unemployment rate under the modern gestalt of unemployment counting. The actual number may be a bit higher if you include the “under employed” (we did that until the Obama administration). We have an estimated more that 7.6 million job openings in the U.S. as of April 1, 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If we add a couple million new manufacturing jobs, where are we going to get the people? Maybe some folks who have dropped out of the workforce will come back, but that is a small number.
We need to re-open the gates at Ellis Island. While there has been a clamp down in illegal immigration, the floodgates of legal immigration, which this administration has stated it seeks, are still not open wide enough. The trade policy and the immigration policy are on a collision course if we do not recognize the relationships between these different agendas and their impact domestically.
Most CHROs in the manufacturing and import-sensitive industries (pretty much everyone) are trying to build contingency plans because based on the current lack of clarity, no one knows what country to hire in next.
To the extent that organizations like the HR Policy Association or SHRM or your companies can use their lobbying muscle to highlight to the current administration that immigration policy needs to open the pipeline for legal immigration with appropriate vetting, it is critical that we do so now to prevent an even worse labor shortage and workforce crisis in the coming years.
Elliot Clark
CEO
