Mike Rowe: Why Are 7.2 Million Able-Bodied Men Not Looking for Work?
American Thought Leaders
Jan Jekielek
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
President Donald Trump has promised that he will bring back American manufacturing during his presidency. What if there aren’t enough Americans who want to work those jobs?
“Every year for the last decade or so, for every five tradesmen who retire, two replace them,” says Mike Rowe, Emmy Award-winning TV host of the Dirty Jobs series.
“If we don’t have a workforce who is disabused of the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths and the misperceptions that have kept millions of kids from giving these jobs an honest look ... you’re going to wind up in a pretty nasty feedback loop,” he says.
“People still don’t believe me. Even when I show them, not just the stats, but the actual humans who are making $150-grand a year welding with an $8,000 certificate, they just don’t believe it,” he says.
Rowe is the founder of mikeroweWORKS Foundation, which awards millions of dollars in work ethic scholarships for young people to learn a skilled trade.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Every year, for the last decade or so, for every five tradesmen who retire, two replace them. |
| 0:08.3 | If the president succeeds in truly reinvigorating American manufacturing, he's going to run into not just a skill gap, but a will gap. |
| 0:19.2 | If we don't have a workforce who is disabused of the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths |
| 0:25.4 | and the misperceptions that have kept millions of kids from giving these jobs an honest |
| 0:29.4 | look, you're going to wind up in a pretty nasty feedback loop. |
| 0:33.8 | Mike Rowe is the Emmy Award-winning TV host of the Dirty Jobs series and CEO of the Micro Works Foundation, |
| 0:40.3 | which awards millions in work ethics scholarships for young people to learn a skilled trade. |
| 0:45.3 | We really have to understand what we did to incite this. |
| 0:50.3 | You know, we took shop class out of high school. |
| 0:53.3 | What we did was we removed those jobs from sight for everybody. |
| 0:59.6 | This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. |
| 1:04.6 | Mike Rowe, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:08.3 | It's great to see you again. Thanks. |
| 1:10.2 | We're kind of in an unusual time. I think American manufacturing is on the road back, |
| 1:16.8 | but just at the very beginning of that road. Tell me your thoughts on this. |
| 1:21.4 | Well, I'm optimistic on the one hand, but I'm a little troubled on the other. I think maybe the best way to sum it up is with |
| 1:30.3 | a series of phone calls that my foundation gets every week now. Most recently I heard from somebody |
| 1:36.3 | over at the Blue Forge Alliance. Well, Blue Forge Alliance oversees the Maritime Industrial |
| 1:43.3 | Base. The Maritime Industrial Base consists of 15,000 |
| 1:48.2 | individual companies who are collectively tasked with building our country's submarines, our nuclear-powered |
| 1:54.7 | subs. Their current cadence requires them to deliver three a year. I think two Virginia class |
| 2:00.8 | and one Columbia class, |
... |
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