Perhaps the distractions of the Trump administration’s possible ties to Russia may have a silver lining for President Donald Trump.
Spygate may save Trump from the negative attention he should be getting sooner or later for being unable to fulfill his “Make America Great Again” promise of bringing back manufacturing jobs.
Even if Trump’s administrative team could find the light switches in the West Wing, it cannot turn back the decades and bring back the time when manufacturing was done by Americans, not robots.
Chattanooga is a perfect example.
In our city’s “Dynamo of Dixie” days in the 1960s, some 40 to 42 percent of all Chattanooga workers were employed in manufacturing in factories and foundries like U.S. Pipe where production depended on human muscle before the market moved from cast iron pipe to mass-produced plastic pipe. But today, despite this decade’s addition of the Volkswagen plant and its suppliers here, our manufacturing jobs make up less than 12.8 percent of the workforce in the six-county metro Chattanooga area, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.