Mitchell Hartman

That has made the desire to hire much lower than it would have been in 21 and 22.

The data from the Institute for Supply Management is clear.

The manufacturing sector has been expanding now for the past five months and May was stronger than April.

But executives remain hesitant to go all in and hire more workers, says ISM survey chair Susan Spence, because there's still so much unknown about tariffs and war and inflation.

And Spence says hiring managers are stressed out.

They're telling her...

The uptick in manufacturing is at least good for workers' paychecks, but not great for those looking to get hired, says University of New Orleans labor economist Ali Bustamante.

We're seeing a jobless manufacturing rebound.

A lot of firms, they're investing more in machines, more in overtime, expanding shifts, and we are probably going to see that in higher productivity per worker.

Now, remember, President Trump's tariffs were supposed to give domestic producers a competitive edge, leading to reshoring and more manufacturing jobs.

But Bustamante says that hasn't happened.

The first year and a half of these tariffs during the second Trump administration, we can say pretty unequivocally there hasn't been an employment rebound in manufacturing.

Michael Gritton sees all this playing out in Louisville, where he runs Kentuckiana Works, the regional workforce development agency.

Last year, manufacturing, we lost 2,700 jobs across the region.

Local manufacturers like GE Appliances and Ford are planning to expand in the coming year.

But he doesn't expect a lot of net jobs to be added because AI and automation are doing more and more of the work.

I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

But he kind of approached me and said, hey, there's a new robotics company coming to campus focusing on food delivery.

They allowed me to go on launch trips where I launched Oregon State University, Arizona State University, and assisted with some of the mapping that goes around campuses as well.

This is a perfect fit because I'm interested in robotics.