Pittsburgh residents, workers and business owners react to the increasingly fraught trading reality now upending supply chains and hitting prices
www.theguardian.com
The brewery’s chief operating officer, Alaina Webber, says: “For the first time, as a company in operation going on 15 years, we’ve started to get explicit emails that say: ‘On this existing order, you are now going to see a 30%, then to a 130% increase.’”
The brewery is based in Braddock, in the Allegheny valley, in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, where the Scots-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill about 150 years ago, founding an industry that underpinned the industrialisation of America.
Today, the vast mill is still in operation, but the tariffs Trump claims will restore the glory of rust-belt towns such as this have inflicted chaos on thousands of firms across the region.
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At the other end of town, outside the vast Edgar Thomson steel mill, workers gathered in a union social hall are reluctant to chat.
One man says he and his mates are divided about the merits of the long-running takeover battle for the plant’s owner US Steel, by Japan’s Nippon Steel. “That’s a tricky subject,” he says.
But he holds out hope that Trump’s tariffs will bring change to towns like this, where shops are shuttered and many of the clapboard houses have broken windows. “I think they might work, because we have been taking a beating lately,” the steelworker says. “America’s been robbed and abused and I think it’s time that we start taking care of our own, and they start taking care of theirs.”
The international president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers union, David McCall, has praised Trump’s tariffs, calling them “a crucial means of reining in bad actors who view access to the US market as a right, not a privilege.”
At the nearby headquarters of the Steel Valley Authority, which has been supporting businesses in this region for decades, its veteran executive director Tom Croft is more sceptical.
“What we’re hearing is there’s just a lot of uncertainty. The prices are the big thing, and the supply chain of products,” he says. “Right now, it’s too early to tell, but people are thinking it’s very much like the Covid shutdown.”
He doesn’t object to the idea of targeted tariffs as part of a wider industrial policy, but he says: “The way they’re going about it has made a lot of the smaller manufacturers and managers wonder what the hell they’re going to do.”
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