My dad worked at the Texaco refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, for 41 years. He started there in 1950, just in time to catch the wave of American industrial might at its height. He was 17 years old, and had a wife and a kid (me). For decades, the refinery was the heartbeat of the Golden Triangle area of Southeast Texas, employing over 4,000 workers. Dad was one of them, blue-collar, hard-working, union proud.
Every two years, they’d go out on strike. Not because they hated the company. Not because they didn’t want to work. But because the union gave them power. Power to demand better wages, safer conditions, and secure retirements. And it worked.
Thanks to that job and just as importantly, that union, our family lived a solid middle-class life. My parents built a new brick home in a good neighborhood. My mother never worked outside the home. Vacations happened. College was possible. And when Dad retired, he had a pension, a nest egg, and his dignity intact.
That kind of story was once so common it bordered on cliché. Now it seems a pipedream.
President Trump, back in office since January, has spent the last several months doubling down on his vision of a manufacturing revival. He insists that to be a prosperous country again, we must restore the industrial glory days when steel mills roared and assembly lines buzzed with American workers. Over the past few days, he’s imposed sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” on imports from nearly every trading partner, promising that it will bring jobs and factories back to American soil.
But the economic world has changed. Even if we could wave a magic wand and bring every factory back from China, Mexico, and Southeast Asia, it still wouldn’t restore the kind of middle-class prosperity we once knew. Because those good times weren’t just about the jobs. They were about the unions.
You won’t hear Trump say that.
You’ll hear promises of manufacturing booms and slogans about “Made in America.” But you won’t hear a word about collective bargaining. You won’t hear praise for labor unions. And you definitely won’t hear any talk of striking for better pay. In fact, his administration and much of the modern Republican Party has done everything it can to break what’s left of the American labor movement.
Now, I’m not blind to the sometime excesses of what Unions became. But there isn’t any question that Unions were responsible for middle-class economic power in the mid-20th Century.
Back in the 1980s, something started to shift. I remember clearly when one of the regular refinery strikes dragged on for over a year. It broke the union. Because Texaco no longer needed all those workers. Slowly but surely, automation began to replace jobs. At the end of his career, dad was an Operator, spending most of his time in a room watching gauges. Over the next decade, employment at that refinery dropped from over 4,000 to just a few hundred. The machines didn’t strike. They didn’t retire. They didn’t demand weekends off. They worked 24/7 without complaint.
That trend hasn’t stopped. It’s accelerated.
Today, U.S. manufacturing output is near all-time highs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that factory output has nearly doubled in real terms since 1980, while manufacturing employment has fallen from 19.2 million to just 12.9 million. The reason? Automation and robotics. Machines don’t need breaks, health insurance, or pensions. They just work.
Researchers at MIT have shown that every additional robot per 1,000 workers results in the loss of about 5.6 jobs, and a measurable decline in wages for those who remain. So even if Trump’s tariffs succeed in forcing companies to reshore production, most of the new factories will be staffed by robots, not people.
But let’s imagine for a moment that the robots stayed in their boxes and the factories hired thousands of American workers. Would that bring back the middle class? No. Because without unions, the jobs alone don’t guarantee prosperity.
The refinery job gave my dad a paycheck. The union made it a good one.
In the 1950s, about 35 percent of private-sector workers were unionized. Today, that number is barely 6 percent. That collapse mirrors the decline of the American middle class. Wages have stagnated. Job security is gone. Benefits are cut to the bone. And still, we chase the mirage of a factory-driven future while ignoring the structural supports that made those jobs livable in the first place.
Between 1979 and 2020, productivity in the U.S. rose by over 60 percent, but hourly pay for the average worker rose only 17 percent. What changed? Power. Workers lost it. Corporations got it. And wages flatlined.
That’s the real story behind our economic malaise, and it’s a story Trump doesn’t want to tell. His new round of tariffs may punish foreign exporters, but history tells us they’ll backfire here at home just like they did during his first term. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Trump’s original tariff regime protected about 173,000 jobs, but cost over 300,000 jobs due to retaliatory tariffs and higher prices for inputs like steel and electronics.
This time, with even broader tariffs in place and global inflationary pressures still lingering, the economic fallout is likely to be more severe. Prices are rising. Manufacturers are hesitating. And ordinary Americans are, once again, caught in the middle.
All of this, including automation, anti-union policies, flawed tariff logic, leads to one conclusion: Trump’s factory fantasy is rooted in nostalgia, not reality. It’s a myth sold to struggling Americans who rightly want dignity, opportunity, and a better life, but who are being offered the shadow of a solution instead of the substance.
We don’t need to bring back the past. We need to understand it.
If we want to rebuild the middle class, it’s not enough to bring back factories. We have to bring back power to the people who work in them. That means strong unions. It means real collective bargaining rights. It means ending the war on labor that has left millions of workers with no seat at the table. Now, whether that’s possible in the 2025 world is speculative at best.
So let’s stop pretending that the return of manufacturing alone will fix what’s broken. Let’s stop believing that prosperity is just one more tariff away. The truth is harder than that, but also more hopeful. Because while we can’t reverse globalization or un-invent robots, we can still fight for justice. We can still organize. We can still demand an economy that works for the people who do the work.
My dad’s generation knew that. They didn’t wait for politicians to make it happen. They made it happen themselves. And maybe, if we stop chasing ghosts and start building power again, we can too.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Columns. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
