Well in certain cities, that’s what you do. I grew up in Windsor (On, Canada) and it was like Detroit. The big three pay really well (even after starting a tiered system to reduce wages). If you could get into the factory, you were pretty much set. One nice thing about factory work is that once your shift is done, it’s done, though the monotony of it. Note, that is if the factory is decent to their employees, we’re not talking about places like Amazon that try to squeeze everything out of a person.

Also note, one of my regrets was not going into the trades, in high school I loved design aspects and CAD (we had some pretty awesome Co-op/programs) but it was expected that I would go to uni.