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U.S. President Donald Trump has built an entire economic agenda around a promise to revive the standing that American manufacturing once held in the 1940s and 1950s. Dismissing recent attention on green industry and semiconductors, the president is deploying a massive set of tariffs—on adversaries and allies alike—and promising workers that he will restore the country to where it was back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Before he sent the global economy into turmoil on his so-called “Liberation Day,” Trump promised that “April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has built an entire economic agenda around a promise to revive the standing that American manufacturing once held in the 1940s and 1950s. Dismissing recent attention on green industry and semiconductors, the president is deploying a massive set of tariffs—on adversaries and allies alike—and promising workers that he will restore the country to where it was back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Before he sent the global economy into turmoil on his so-called “Liberation Day,” Trump promised that “April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.”

Thus far, the rollout has not exactly worked that way. After more than a trillion dollars in wealth were destroyed within days, Trump ultimately backed away from his threats. Other than his levies on China, the president temporarily paused most of the high tariffs. He promised to revisit them after giving other countries time to negotiate deals. Making even more concessions, Trump then exempted smartphones, computers, and chips from the program.

If the other tariffs do go into effect, most economists doubt that they will be able to bring manufacturing back to the United States. The supply chains and production systems that are at the heart of the modern economy can’t be rebuilt with such speed. Nor is the United States investing in the knowledge-based research and skills needed to make such plants work.

And even if the economic wisdom is wrong, and the tariffs miraculously sprouted up factories across the United States, the president is missing—or more accurately, ignoring—a key ingredient of what made life so great for working and middle-class Americans in the 1940s and 1950s: unions.

The presence of bountiful manufacturing in the United States was not the sole reason that labor thrived. Rather, the hard work that produced substantive collective bargaining agreements generated the economic benefits and job security that are so desperately sought by large swaths of the electorate today.

Seventy-five years ago, the power of labor was on display in Michigan. On May 23, 1950, the United Autoworkers and General Motors signed a historic collective bargaining agreement that journalist Daniel Bell called the “Treaty of Detroit” in Fortune magazine.

During the decades leading up to the agreement, the role of organized labor in the U.S. economy had been vastly expanding. While the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had established itself by early in the 20th century as a champion for trade workers, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) took form during the New Deal era to represent the millions of shopfloor workers who were building products such as automobiles that fueled the consumer economy.

The CIO organized........

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