Have you tried to hire a sewing machine operator lately?

I haven’t, but I have friends running major apparel companies who have (guess where I get all those tight fitting jeans?).

Guess what? There aren’t any to be had.

Since, 1990, some 77% of the American textiles workforce has been lost, when China joined the world economy in force, and the offshoring trend took flight.

Now that manufacturing is at last coming home, the race is on to find the workers to man it. Welcome to onshoring 2.0.

The development has been prompted by several seemingly unrelated events. There is an ongoing backlash to several disasters at garment makers in Bangladesh, the current low cost producer, which have killed thousands.

Today’s young consumers want to look cool, but have a clean conscience as well. That doesn’t happen when your threads are sewn together by child slave laborers working for $1 a day.

Several firms are now tapping into the high-end market where the well off are willingly paying top dollar for a well-made “Made in America” label.

Look no further than 7 For All Mankind, which is offering just such a product at a discount to all recent buyers of the Tesla Model S-1 (TSLA), that other great all American manufacturer (click here for their website).

As a result, wages for cut and sew jobs are now among the fastest growing in the country, up 13.2% in real terms since 2007, versus a paltry 1.4% for industry as a whole.

Apparel industry recruiters are plastering high schools and church communities with flyers in their desperate quest for new workers. They advertise in languages with high proportions of blue-collar workers, like Spanish, Somali, and Hmong.

New immigrants are particularly being targeted. And yes, they are resorting to the technology that originally hollowed out their industry, creating websites to suck in new applicants.

Chinese workers now earn $3 an hour versus $9 plus benefits at the lowest paying US factories. But the extra cost is more than made up for by savings in transportation and logistics, and the rapid time to market.