Also, from listening to many friends who did work in factories in their younger years, working in a factory is a horrible experience.

But not all blue collar work is factory work. We need more people in the trades, and I hear that's much more pleasant.

By qualified candidate, they mean trainable.

However, if they use a hiring platform, it's why they can't find candidates. Hiring platforms silently drop viable candidates, while other checks serve to weed out the best people.

A few classes of hireable people that businesses work hard to not hire:

    First job applicants
    Applicants with breaks in their job history
    Candidates with minor criminal records (ex: excessive speed)
    People with not-high credit scores
    People in wrong zip codes
    Applicants who match irrelevant criteria hidden by black-box algorithms 
    People who are bad at typical job interviews

Four of my sons went thru high school VoTech here. Schools don't make it easy. Some classes are filled up years in advance and the student graduates before there's an opening.

The mandatory 4-year college track gets every priority. VoTech has to be squeezed into the what electives are left over. This isn't just here and now. This is all over and isn't much changed from my high school days.

The administration has taken steps to eliminate the Job Corps, a 60-year-old program that provides at-risk youths from 16 to 24 with a path to a career in the trades.

And this is another problem. US politicians are evenly divided between the hapless and the hostile.

A top priority in the Contract with American was to axe job training that was effective at getting people into tax paying jobs. I know because I was in one of those programs.