> I don't know why on earth you would want to bring back people getting burned alive in steel mills
We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.
This is part of the Labor vs Capital stuff I mentioned in my post. We're not likely to have strong unions again in the near future, so any jobs we bring are likely going to be dangerous in addition to carrying low pay.
OTOH if we posit strong Labor, the good news is we have a lot of jobs now that we can turn into Good Jobs. We could, for example, make it so that any large employer pay their employees enough such that nobody who works for them full time (including contractors) is eligible for income-based government assistance at the state or federal level. We could choose to expand those rules to any organization over a certain size. There's a lot we can do to turn Bad Jobs into Better Jobs without boiling the ocean and moving industry supply chains.
We don't want to bring back their 3rd world safety standards. We just want to bring the jobs. Factory work can be less rote if teams rotate or their employer provides enough rest. Unions are a potential solution to this issue.