Let’s get something straight up front: bringing flooring manufacturing back to the U.S., a stated purpose of the current tariff movement, is not the same as bringing back good jobs. One makes headlines. The other makes a life.

There’s a lot of flag-waving going on in boardrooms, political rallies, and booth signage right now. “Domestic SPC!” “Proudly American-Made!” “Jobs, Not Containers!” It’s a story that sounds right, but it’s got a plot hole you could drive a LVT-laden semi through. Most of these new jobs don’t pay more, protect more, or build more than the ones we offshored 20 years ago. What we’ll be witnessing isn’t a renaissance. It’s a reshuffle.

Onshoring ≠ Middle Class

Yes, flooring jobs are coming back. Eventually. Factories are opening in towns that haven’t had a new employer in a decade. Ribbon cuttings, state tax credits, and shovel-ready enthusiasm abound. But what’s being built?

• $17-an-hour press operators with no benefits.
• Two-week PTO caps for people expected to work six-day rotations.
• Temp staffing firms running entire packaging lines inside billion-dollar investments.

Onshoring without upskilling just recreates the same problem in a different time zone. The flooring industry is labor-intensive, low-margin, and high-churn at every tier below corporate. Without deliberate investment in:

• Career pathing
• Upskilling
• Health/safety benefits
• Profit-sharing or equity programs 

Unless these systemic changes are made, flooring will remain a gig economy wrapped in a brand story.

The Automation Gap

Europe figured it out. China figured it out. Even the car guys figured it out. You don’t build high-margin products with low-skill labor. You build them with systems that are too complicated to screw up and too precise to fake. So why are so many U.S. flooring startups still betting on warmed-over hiring practices from the 1980s? If we’re going to bring manufacturing back, we need to bring the German factory floor ethic, the Toyota kaizen discipline, and the Apple quality obsession with it.

• You want quality? Pay for it. 
• You want retention? Train for it. 
• You want pride? Build it. 

How This Goes Bad

Here’s the movie we’ve seen before: 

1. Tariffs drive importers into building U.S. plants.
2. Domestic capacity gets labeled “world-class” before the first pallet ships.
3. Product launches rushed. QA stumbles. Claims spike.
4. Retailers start whispering: “Avoid that line. Their stuff curls.”
5. Contractors start churning. Good workers go back to roofing or logistics.
6. By Year 3, the plant is a write-off or a line item in a PE fire sale.

Tariffs change the economics of production, but not the structure of employment. They create margin, breathing room for manufacturers.

Whether that room becomes a bonus pool, a training budget, a PTO expansion plan, or simply a bigger quarterly EBITDA payout depends entirely on leadership’s choices.

In the absence of public policy or investor activism tied to labor outcomes, the most likely result is:

• Churn remains high
• Wages stay flat
• The supply chain stays fragile
• And the people doing the work stay exhausted

Meanwhile, nothing changed in the community except a new building with half-lit signage and a higher turnover rate than the Waffle House across the highway.

How This Could Go Right 

Let’s not just be critics. Let’s be builders. Here’s what we could do: 

• Tie state incentives to job quality, not just job count.
• Do you want tax breaks? Offer a 401(k) and an apprenticeship pathway. Require minimum automation ratios. No more glue-and-go operations calling themselves advanced manufacturing.
• Partner with tech colleges. Get a pipeline of operators who know how to calibrate, use AI, and understand financial literacy. Not just clock in.
• Create real retention plans. Profit-sharing, tuition reimbursement, wellness programs, and functional PTO. Not ping-pong and foosball tables in the breakroom.
• And here’s a wild idea: let’s stop pretending that “Made in the USA” is a product feature if we’re not also willing to make “Working in the USA” a worthwhile, economically positive proposition.

Consider this. As I state in Chapter 11, “Inflation Arbitrage” in my recent publication, “The Little Greige Book,” the infrequency of flooring purchases provides air cover for higher-end market prices and net profit, allowing for this to create greater enterprise value and worker class growth. Imagine an industry that can brag about that?

The Bottom Line

Bringing flooring manufacturing back to the U.S. should be a rising tide moment. However, if we’re not careful, we’ll end up flooding the labor market with the same low-wage, low-skill jobs that drove away the talent in the first place.

The flooring supply chain isn’t just a place that makes products. It’s a place that makes people valuable or discards them.

So to all the execs, investors, and economic development teams cheering on onshoring: the question isn’t how fast you can open the doors. It’s what happens when someone walks through them. Will it be a job? Or a future?