Lutnick: Trump tariffs will create robot repair jobs of the future
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has established a promising direction for the upcoming years of American manufacturing by asserting that steep new tariffs will create both a manufacturing renaissance and “great jobs of the future,” which include robot maintenance and repair functions.
Lutnick stated during his CNBC’s The Exchange interview that we need to teach people skills for future opportunities rather than past employment. The new employment model features people working in these facilities throughout their entire career span alongside their offspring and descendants.
The tariffs established by President Donald Trump aim to drive businesses toward relocating production and supply chain operations back to the United States from manufacturing centers in China and Vietnam.
The automation of factories, according to Lutnick, will produce opportunities for community college graduates and individuals without four-year degrees to earn $70,000 to $80,000 annually while working as robotic system technicians.
Lutnick emphasized that people should witness the operations of an auto manufacturing facility. The production facility uses advanced automation, yet its workforce of 4,000 to 5,000 employees receives training to care for robotic equipment. The trained workers maintain air conditioning systems operation.
Labor experts: Automation’s impact on jobs remains deeply uncertain
The perspective presented by Lutnick does not match those of other observers. Many labor experts, together with economists, predict that automation will reduce employment levels while decreasing labor earnings.
The research conducted by Daron Acemoglu at MIT and Pascual Restrepo at Boston University in 2020 discovered that factory robots per 1,000 employees decreased wages by 0.42% while reducing employment-to-population numbers by 0.2%, resulting in 400,000 job losses in the U.S.
In an interview with MIT Sloan School of Management, Acemoglu highlighted the effects of robots on productivity. “Our evidence shows that robots increase productivity,” Acemoglu said.
“They are very important for continued growth and for firms, but at the same time they destroy jobs and they reduce labor demand. Those effects of robots also need to be taken into account.”
Speaking to Fortune, Rutgers University labor historian Eric Blanc said that without equivalent labor protections, manufacturing jobs today are predicted to fail in meeting employee expectations regarding job security and earnings.
“The reason people associate factory jobs with good jobs and have this nostalgic view of the heyday of American manufacturing in the 1950s, when you could have one breadwinner providing for the whole family—that was the product of unionization.”
Outsourcing, automation, and the global labor market
The current business trends reveal a complicated future for global outsourcing activities. The reshoring movement, together with automation technology, might decrease the need for international workers, but the growing use of robots might simultaneously create opportunities for worldwide technical support services.
The debate will persist because tariffs, automation, and employment have an evolving connection that shapes both business operations and worker opportunities across the globe.
