It is not about romanticism. Manufacturing inherently is more resource intensive and has broader indirect impact to the economy. Take 10 restaurants with 100 em

It is not about romanticism. Manufacturing inherently is more resource intensive and has broader indirect impact to the economy. Take 10 restaurants with 100 employees and a plant with 100 employees. The restaurant just pays salaries to 100 people (with no specialized skills) and rent to the local real estate market (raw material and maintenance costs are very low). On the other hand a plant would need to have trained manufacturing engineers, safety engineers, economists, quality control, managers, sales, technicians, and they would support a big part of the local economy (IT, welders, machinists, logistics companies etc). A plant typically also has less personnel turnover, exactly because specialized labor is more scarce. That means that they have the incentive to provide full time jobs with good benefits to significant fraction of their workers.