Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was as soon as synonymous with America’s industrial may.
The area was recognized for its booming manufacturing economic system anchored by firms like Mack Vehicles and Bethlehem Metal, the latter of which employed over 30,000 staff at its peak within the Nineteen Fifties.
However manufacturing started to battle within the Nineteen Seventies and collapsed by the flip of the century. Bethlehem Metal went bankrupt in 2001 (the location now homes a on line casino). All of this made the Lehigh Valley into a logo of the ills of de-industrialization. There’s even a Billy Joel tune about it.
President Donald Trump has stated his ongoing commerce conflict is supposed largely to convey manufacturing jobs again to communities like this. However, within the Lehigh Valley, it’s having the alternative impact: Final month, Mack Vehicles introduced it might be shedding about 10 p.c of its unionized staff at its Lehigh Valley plant, and pointed to tariffs and the financial uncertainty they’ve prompted as the explanation.
“We have been very shocked,” Mack Vehicles worker and UAW Native 677 District 1 Committeeperson Dan Hand instructed me. “We’ve those that simply began engaged on the store flooring Monday of final week. … They’re scared.”
After I noticed a neighborhood information story about these layoffs, I knew I needed to drive as much as the valley from my dwelling in Philadelphia to speak to Hand and his coworkers in individual. I anticipated them to be mad. However I discovered a extra difficult story — and extra difficult emotions in regards to the tariffs.
Final summer time, Mack Vehicles’ mum or dad firm, Volvo, introduced it was constructing an enormous new truck plant in Mexico. The corporate stated it deliberate to complement its American workforce, not change it, however Hand and his union members have been upset and scared that their jobs, like so many others of their trade, would finally transfer south of the border. In March, UAW 577 put out a press launch blasting Mack’s resolution and endorsing tariffs as a instrument to struggle it.
Now, even with the upcoming layoffs, Mack’s Lehigh Valley workforce is cut up on Trump’s tariff coverage. “It doesn’t seem to be there’s a very good sport plan,” stated Hand, who voted for Trump in 2016, however then soured on him due to his therapy of organized labor in his first time period.
John Taniser, alternatively, instructed me short-term ache is price it for long-term change. He voted for Trump in 2024 and stays assured within the president’s imaginative and prescient.
“It might be a yr. It might be two years. However what we’re searching for is a path ahead to thrive and never simply maintain and exist,” stated Taniser, a 27-year veteran of Mack’s manufacturing line. “On this economic system that we’re in presently, there’s no going ahead.”
Almost all economists agree that it’s unlikely manufacturing will ever play as massive a job within the American economic system because it did within the mid-Twentieth century. My colleague Dylan Matthews wrote an article lately about how, as nations get richer, all of them see manufacturing jobs changed with service trade jobs.
That was the case throughout the US over the past century, and that’s true within the Lehigh Valley too: The biggest employers within the county now are hospitals and Amazon warehouses. Manufacturing itself has modified over time, too. Even when firms like Mack buck the pattern and make investments extra in the USA, that finally received’t translate into many new jobs: As manufacturing expertise has improved, factories want fewer and fewer human staff.
However that’s a tough capsule to swallow for individuals in communities that have been constructed round manufacturing and which have suffered from its decline. Many hope tariffs will nonetheless, regardless of what consultants say, rewind the clock and reverse that decline.
“These nice jobs — they constructed the Valley,” Taniser stated. “These staff are those who purchased all these properties, who shopped in any respect these shops. It’s not there anymore. And we need to convey it again. I would like it again.”
This piece initially ran within the At present, Defined e-newsletter. For extra tales like this, enroll right here.
