For some US workers, it’s trade — not tariffs — that is the dirty word
To many observers, Donald Trump’s tariffs look like a very bad idea. But some US workers se things differently, writes Heather Long
As President Donald Trump signed hefty tariffs on most steel and aluminium imports last week, his top economic adviser Gary Cohn stood in the back of the room with his arms crossed and a pained look on his face.
Cohn, who last week announced his resignation, disagreed vehemently with Trump over the tariffs. Most Republican lawmakers, business leaders, economists and Wall Street traders agree with him that restricting trade is a mistake, and they are baffled at how trade became such a dirty word in the White House — and parts of America.
Kameen Thompson is trying to help them understand. Thompson, a 37-yearold st eelworker f rom outside Philadelphia, drove through a snowstorm to be in Washington D.C. He hoped to stand by Trump during the signing of the tariffs, but the United Steelworkers union asked him to do a harder job: go to Capitol Hill and educate lawmakers.
Thompson says he explained to them how he worked in construction and call centres during his teens and early 20s. It was a good year when he made US$35,000 ($47,700).
In 2005, he heard about a steel job at t he ArcelorMittal plant in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. He was hired, and overnight his pay jumped to US$80,000 plus benefits.
“I haven’t dipped under US$80,000 since I started working in steel,” says Thompson, who is now the president of his local union, USW 9462. “That’s something you can build a family on.”
The reason the plant was hiring in 2005 was a big order from the military to supply high-strength steel to provide more amour for Humvee vehicles in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
Thompson’s plant hummed with around 400 union workers until 2012. Then military orders dried up and the old customer base was gone; some had closed during the Great Recession, while others had switched to other steel mills for their supplies. In 2015, metal prices crashed, driven largely by China flooding the world market with cheap steel. Today the plant in Conshohocken has about 200 union workers, with more layoffs planned for this year.
When Trump st arted campaigning to save bluecollar jobs and punish countries that don’t play fairly on trade, his message resonated among manufacturing workers, many of whom were going through fresh rounds of layoffs and pay freezes.
“Lots of steelworkers who were maybe Democrats didn’t switch party per se, but they switched to the person who had their best interest,” says Thompson.
Trump talks often about unfair trade, but experts say automation is the real threat to blue-collar jobs. Research by professors at Ball State University in Indiana found that 88 per cent of US manufacturing job losses between 2000 and 2010 were due to robots and technology. It helps explain why US manufacturing output is near a record today, but blue-collar employment is way down from its peak in 1979.
But there’s a different view in the Rust Belt. Job losses from trade are far more visible to most workers than job losses from automation. When a factory closes and jobs go overseas — or even to another state — hundreds of workers lose their jobs overnight. In contrast, when robots arrive, only a few workers are displaced and they are often sent to other parts of the factory.
“Automation doesn’t close plants, it refits them. It’s more of a gradual change, like the slow boiling of the frog,” says Gordon Hanson, director of the Centre on Global Transformation at the University of California San Diego. “The China shock throws the frog into a pot of boiling water.”
Robots also tend to take over the most backbreaking jobs in the factory, allowing workers to save their bodies and move into more high-tech roles overseeing machines.
Many economists and Wall Street bankers also like to point out that manufacturing is a small part of America’s economy today — just 12 per cent. What they miss is that manufacturing remains core to the local identity in much of the Rust Belt.
“People really identify with these occupations that for so long defined these communities. They identify as scrappy, hard-working folks,” says Jill Ann Harrison, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, traditionally a steelmaking centre, and who studies deindustrialisation.
Even if people don’t work in the mills, they grew up seeing the unions and factories sponsor the local Little League teams and charity events. Their relatives work — or worked — in the factories that still dominate the town’s landscape.
Even in Pittsburgh, which has seen one of the greatest reinventions of the early 21st century as a high-tech city, people still identify with steel.
“Let's face it, we've got one of best football teams in the world: the Pittsburgh Steelers. You're not going to hear them called the Pittsburgh technologies. Steel is how we're identified,” says Scott Sauritch, a 58-year-old who works at one of the US Steel plants just outside Pittsburgh.