The Labor Math Nobody's Doing

Everyone's celebrating the reshoring boom. New chip fabs, new battery plants, new EV assembly lines, all being built on American soil for the first time in a generation. It's a genuine win, and it should be celebrated.

But here's the question nobody's asking: where are all the workers for all of it coming from?

Because at the same time we're breaking ground on hundreds of billions of dollars in new manufacturing capacity, we're also sitting on a construction labor shortage that isn't closing, it's widening. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027, just to keep pace with existing demand, before you add a single new factory to the mix.

Those two facts are connected, and I don't think we're talking about it enough.

The same limited labor pool, pulled many directions

Research out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland gives us a real look at where manufacturing's new workers are actually coming from. Using five years of Current Population Survey data, they tracked every worker without a college degree moving into or out of manufacturing. The construction sector is the second largest source, right behind retail.

Here's the part that should stop us: workers moving from construction into manufacturing often take a pay cut to do it. Construction wages already run as high or higher than manufacturing. So this isn't factories out-bidding builders on money. Something else, schedule predictability, indoor work, the appeal of one employer instead of project-to-project churn, is pulling skilled workers out of a sector that already can't find enough of them.

And that's just the permanent workforce. Before a factory ever opens, building it competes directly with residential and commercial construction for the same electricians, pipefitters, and superintendents. Construction megaprojects, chip fabs, battery plants, alone totaled over 134 billion dollars through just the first three quarters of 2025, a 47 percent jump over the prior year. That's not new labor. That's the same limited pool, stretched thinner.

Manufacturing isn't sitting on a surplus, either

If you're thinking manufacturing must have slack construction doesn't, the data says otherwise. The National Association of Manufacturers' Q1 2026 survey found 77 percent of manufacturers saying they can't find enough workers, with projections of up to 2 million unfilled manufacturing roles by the early 2030s. 77 percent.

Both industries are structurally short-handed. Neither has a surplus to lend the other. When a new factory opens, it isn't redistributing extra capacity, it's intensifying a scarcity that already existed on both sides.

This isn't a construction problem. It's a labor supply problem.

Widen the lens past construction and manufacturing and the same pattern shows up in agriculture and hospitality. Foreign-born workers make up roughly 43 percent of farm workers, 30 percent of food production and processing, 28 percent of construction, and 20 percent of hospitality workers nationally, according to Econofact's analysis of federal labor data. These aren't jobs where immigrant labor is displacing American workers competing for the same roles. These are sectors where domestic labor supply, on its own, isn't covering the increased demand, and hasn't been for years.

That's an important distinction, and it deserves to be said: filling these jobs with documented, eligible foreign-born workers is not the same thing as foreign-born workers taking jobs from Americans. There is no meaningful line of US-born workers waiting for these roles that's being cut in front of. The vacancy numbers alone make that case.

This is actually consistent with America First, not opposed to it

Here's where I think the framing gets misunderstood. America First, as an economic policy, is about building things here instead of overseas, about domestic production and reduced reliance on imports. That's the entire premise behind reshoring manufacturing in the first place.

But production requires people. If new factories can't run at capacity and homes can't get built because there aren't enough hands to do the work, the production goal doesn't happen, regardless of where those hands come from. Filling documented labor gaps so American factories can actually run and American houses can actually get built isn't in tension with America First. It's what makes America First achievable.

We don't need fewer workers in these industries. We need a workforce strategy that matches the scale of what we're asking American industry to do. That means investing in training the next generation of tradespeople, and it means making sure the legal pathways that already exist for agricultural and construction labor, H-2A and H-2B, are right sized to match the demand we've created.

If you agree the math doesn't add up right now, the next step is simple: tell your legislators the labor shortage is real, it's shared across industries, and it needs a solution big enough to match. We need workers.