For thirty years we told our kids to stay out of the trades. Get a college degree. Work in an office. The dirty jobs — welding, machining, electrical work, process operations — those were for people who didn’t have options. That narrative is about to reverse violently, and the people who understand it early will be positioned very differently from those who figure it out late.
Craig Tindale made the point without sentiment: we are going to need an enormous number of blue collar workers, and we don’t have them. The Colorado School of Mines needs to double in size. Every industrial training program in the country is undersized for what’s coming. The skills to safely operate a zinc smelter, manage a sulfuric acid processing line, commission a copper refinery — these have been allowed to atrophy for a generation because we decided we didn’t need them. We need them now.
You cannot re-industrialize with white collar workers alone. The physical processes that underpin a functioning industrial economy require people who can operate and maintain physical equipment, troubleshoot process failures in real time, and apply the kind of embodied knowledge that doesn’t exist in a spreadsheet or an AI model. When a valve fails at 2 AM in a processing facility, you need someone who knows what that valve does, why it failed, and how to fix it without shutting down the entire line.
The wage implication is already playing out. Electricians, pipefitters, and industrial mechanics are commanding salaries that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. That trend has years to run. The most valuable workers in the re-industrializing economy will be the ones who can actually make things. That’s not a prediction. It’s already happening.
The Hedge 