Do We Actually Need to Save All the Steel Jobs?
Maybe we should stop romanticizing the manly jobs done by manly men.
President Trump’s latest bit of economic brilliance is an increase in tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50%, a policy that is extremely stupid for a number of reasons. While he cites a national security justification that is at least plausible — steel is important for making weapons and other stuff, and therefore we want to maintain a domestic industry that can’t be shut off — he’s even more interested in saving jobs. Which is why it would be useful to pull back our view a bit to ask: If this is about preserving this particular type of job, why do we think that’s so important?
It’s not a question we often ask; instead, the debate about manufacturing assumes that of course we want more of it. It’s not that you can’t make a case for that position, but when you drill down, you see that many of the kinds of work that we hold in highest esteem just aren’t done by that many Americans anymore. Maybe that’s bad or maybe it’s fine, but at the very least we ought to be open to asking how important it is that we maximize the number of, for instance, steelworking jobs.
There’s plenty of evidence that the steel tariffs Trump imposed during his first term, which were lower than these ones, cost many more jobs than they saved. The number of people employed in the steel industry went up by just a few thousand (for a while), but prices went up too. This is a common effect of tariffs: When foreign goods get dramatically more expensive, domestic manufacturers realize they can bump up their own prices and still be the cheaper option. That hurts all the other industries that utilize these raw materials, and there are many more people employed in those industries than in metal production. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal reported in 2020:
With the expanded production, about 6,000 jobs were added to the U.S. steel industry’s workforce after tariffs started in 2018, according to the Census Bureau. By the end of 2019, though, those gains evaporated as steel demand and prices sank.
Higher prices also made steel more expensive for manufacturers that buy it, leading to the loss of about 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, according to a study released late last year by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
The tariffs led to retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. exports. Harley-Davidson Inc. shifted motorcycle production for Europe to an overseas plant in 2018 after the European Union slapped a 31% tariff on U.S.-made bikes.
Those repercussions weren’t expected when Mr. Trump sketched out his tariff-led trade and infrastructure policy at a 2016 campaign speech in Monessen, Pa., a steel town south of Pittsburgh.
“We are going to put American-produced steel back into the backbone of our country,” Mr. Trump said in 2016. “This alone will create massive numbers of jobs.”
Now Trump is yet again saying that his steel tariffs will produce massive numbers of jobs. In his speech announcing the new tariffs earlier this week in Pittsburgh, he said his tariffs “will create and save over 100,000 American jobs, including 14,000 jobs in Pennsylvania.” That would be quite a trick, given that there are only about 90,000 people working in the entire steel industry:
Real jobs done by real men
As in many industries, while foreign competition made a difference, the real driver of job losses in steel was automation. Because of steady technological advancement, you just need fewer people to produce the same amount of products as you used to. This is a point I make often about the decline of coal jobs; as I like to point out, today more Americans work at the Cheesecake Factory than in the entire coal industry.
But we also have to look at how Trump talks about these jobs, that they are better than other kinds of jobs:
You've gone through a lot. It's closing. It's not closing, it's opening, and you want to stay here. People say, "Well, we'll move to another place and we'll do chips, so we'll do something like chips." Somehow. You don't want to do chips. I'm looking at these giant guys with the giant arms. You're not going to like doing chips.
Trump has a thing about big manly men doing big manly jobs, so much so that he likes to pretend he’s one of them. And you can always tell when Trump is having a good time pretending he’s big and strong, because he does this thing with his lips:
It’s not just Trump, of course. You can argue that it’s important for a nation to have industrial capacity, but all the discussion around this issue assumes that certain kinds of jobs are inherently desirable and ennobling, not because of the salaries they pay or the skills they require but simply because they’re mostly done by men, and often require at least some measure of physical strength (though far less now than they did 50 or 100 years ago).
There’s an unspoken assertion that manly jobs are real jobs, while the jobs that involve sitting at a computer or working with people aren’t quite so real. The person working in some kind of factory — even if that work is dull, repetitive, and poorly remunerated — is supposed to be more fully realized as a human being than someone working as a retail clerk or a home health aide.
There is a set of idealized blue-collar jobs — steelworker, coal miner, machinist — that occupy an outsized place in our discussion about the economy despite the fact that relatively few Americans do them anymore. It isn’t that the decline of those jobs didn’t hurt the people who lost them; of course they did. But once they’re lost, it may be that trying to bring back those specific jobs is a fool’s errand. Sometimes, those jobs get replaced with other kinds of jobs that are perfectly good ones. As I noted in my latest piece at Public Notice about Trump’s war on cities:
Many cities that were once industrial hubs now have economies built on “Eds and Meds” — universities and hospitals. Think Pittsburgh, where the largest employers in its county are the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh, while U.S. Steel ranks all the way down at #18. (In fact, UPMC subsidiaries account for 9 of the top 50 employers in Allegheny County; it bestrides southwestern Pennsylvania like a colossus.)
Is it worse to work in health care than in steel production? The answer isn’t obvious; it will depend on wages, benefits, working conditions, union representation, and more.
Here’s what the most Americans actually do (and of course this is an incomplete and somewhat generalized list):
Is this going to change over time? Of course. For much of our early history, most Americans were farmers; today there are only 1.4 million who farm as their primary occupation, or less than one-half of one percent of us. The economy is always changing.
Might it change because of the policy decisions we make? It can. But one of the most important things is to make sure the jobs Americans do, especially the most common ones like home health aide and retail clerk, offer people the dignity and security they deserve.
To be clear, I’m not saying we should be indifferent to the further loss of jobs in steel or manufacturing. But we also shouldn’t romanticize those jobs to the point where we think it’s only a tragedy if “these giant guys with the giant arms” lose their jobs, but it’s not such a problem if other people do.
One last thing for today on this issue: I want to draw your attention to an article I just published at The New Republic, which looks at the possibilities for an industrial revival through the case study of woodworking tools (spoiler alert: it won’t be easy). It was a fun opportunity to address an important issue and chatter on about my hobby. If you’ve ever wondered who owns all those brands you see in Home Depot, or just how much contempt the folks at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks would express for my Chinese-made #5 jack plane, give it a look.
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They are not just Manly Jobs. They are also Mostly White Manly Jobs. I live in Minnesota and the amount of money the state has spent subsidizing white men's jobs on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota is mind-blowing. (And it has since become a red Congressional District and pretty Trumpy.) If the Minnesota's Iron Range was full of Black and Brown men, it would have been abandoned by the state (and feds) decades ago.
I feel the same way driving across Michigan's Upper Peninsula: all these federal highways and state roads going to very small, dying BUT WHITE AND MANLY small towns, all of whom decry federal spending and vote for Trump and the GOP. If Black and Brown people made up most of Michigan's Upper Peninsula population, roads and infrastructure would have disappeared decades ago. As with so many things in America, it's about White people and their needs and feelings. (And I say this as a White, blonde, blue-eyed person.)
Not to mention that we import only 25% of our steel. Not much room to expand our industries here!