Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was as soon as synonymous with America’s industrial may.
The area was recognized for its booming manufacturing financial system anchored by corporations like Mack Vehicles and Bethlehem Metal, the latter of which employed over 30,000 employees at its peak within the Nineteen Fifties.
However manufacturing started to wrestle within the 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 an emblem of the ills of de-industrialization. There’s even a Billy Joel tune about it.
President Donald Trump has mentioned his ongoing commerce battle 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 employees at its Lehigh Valley plant, and pointed to tariffs and the financial uncertainty they’ve precipitated as the explanation.
“We have been very shocked,” Mack Vehicles worker and UAW Native 677 District 1 Committeeperson Dan Hand instructed me. “We’ve folks that simply began engaged on the store ground Monday of final week. … They’re scared.”
Once I noticed an area information story about these layoffs, I knew I needed to drive as much as the valley from my residence in Philadelphia to speak to Hand and his coworkers in particular person. I anticipated them to be mad. However I discovered a extra sophisticated story — and extra sophisticated emotions in regards to the tariffs.
Final summer time, Mack Vehicles’ guardian firm, Volvo, introduced it was constructing an enormous new truck plant in Mexico. The corporate mentioned it deliberate to complement its American workforce, not substitute it, however Hand and his union members have been upset and scared that their jobs, like so many others of their trade, would ultimately transfer south of the border. In March, UAW 577 put out a press launch blasting Mack’s determination and endorsing tariffs as a software to struggle it.
Now, even with the approaching layoffs, Mack’s Lehigh Valley workforce is cut up on Trump’s tariff coverage. “It doesn’t seem to be there’s a superb recreation plan,” mentioned Hand, who voted for Trump in 2016, however then soured on him due to his remedy of organized labor in his first time period.
John Taniser, however, instructed me short-term ache is value it for long-term change. He voted for Trump in 2024 and stays assured within the president’s imaginative and prescient.
“It may very well be a yr. It may very well be two years. However what we’re searching for is a path ahead to thrive and never simply maintain and exist,” mentioned Taniser, a 27-year veteran of Mack’s manufacturing line. “On this financial system that we’re in presently, there’s no going ahead.”
Practically all economists agree that it’s unlikely manufacturing will ever play as massive a job within the American financial system because it did within the mid-Twentieth century. My colleague Dylan Matthews wrote an article not too long ago about how, as nations get richer, all of them see manufacturing jobs changed with service trade jobs.
That was the case throughout the US during the last century, and that’s true within the Lehigh Valley too: The most important employers within the county now are hospitals and Amazon warehouses. Manufacturing itself has modified over time, too. Even when corporations like Mack buck the development and make investments extra in the US, that finally received’t translate into many new jobs: As manufacturing know-how has improved, factories want fewer and fewer human employees.
However that’s a tough tablet to swallow for folks in communities that have been constructed round manufacturing and which have suffered from its decline. Many hope tariffs will nonetheless, regardless of what specialists say, rewind the clock and reverse that decline.
“These nice jobs — they constructed the Valley,” Taniser mentioned. “These employees 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 need it again.”
This piece initially ran within the In the present day, Defined publication. For extra tales like this, join right here.
