Transcription
I am in Livonia, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit at a company called AlphaUSA. This factory makes fasteners like these for the automotive industry. They're what keep your brake lines and your wires connected to the frame of your car as you drive down the street. Like many other small and medium-sized manufacturers I've talked to this year, AlphaUSA is having problems with Trump's tariffs.
You know we're faced with an existential threat with this unless we get some relief or unless we can pass these costs on our company and many companies like us probably won't exist by the end of next year. I hate to say that, but I mean, it's the truth.
[Gavin] I've covered President Trump's fast-moving trade agenda in a year that's seen him hike tariffs to levels not seen in nearly a century, and tear down the already shaky paradigms of the free trade era. Trump says 2026 will bring a rush of new American factories and jobs, but many of the changes are fragile and his promises have yet to pan out.
Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that's why they're coming home to the USA in record numbers.
[Gavin] Despite Trump's promises, the US has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs this year, but many proponents of his tariff policy, like some of Michigan's Union Auto Workers, say it's already supporting American factories.
The tariffs have definitely moved the needle level the playing field and brought product back here.
Okay, Gavin, this is where the magic happens. Dirty, greasy, grimy manufacturing plant. This is part of our raw material. There's a mixture here of stuff that's come from Taiwan and some from the United States.
[Gavin] In these boxes are thousands of tiny nuts. AlphaUSA takes the imported nuts and stamps them into long strips of US made steel to make its parts, which are then eventually sold to car assembly plants.
There's 50% tariff parts, every one of these. So what used to cost a dime cost 15 cents now, and we've got some parts where we might be putting three large nuts into a part. And they're 47 cents a piece.
[Gavin] Manufacturers like AlphaUSA are subject to tariffs imposed under section 232, a provision that allows the president to impose duties to protect national security. Section 232 has been used in recent years on steel and aluminum imports as well as cars and auto parts. These are different from the sweeping reciprocal tariffs Trump announced on so-called Liberation Day. Those fall under the International Emergency Economic Hours Act, or Ieepa. Trump argues he's allowed to institute these reciprocal tariffs for what he deems as national emergencies like fentanyl and the trade deficit. How much do you think you've paid in tariffs this year so far?
Through November, about 1.3 million US dollars. And the current pace is a quarter of a million dollars a month between 225,000/250,000 a month.
[Gavin] So does that mean that this plant could close, or what does that mean for the business?
I don't know exactly what would happen. We're a vital business partner to our customers. I think in this industry what'll happen is that they would be working with somebody else to still continue to make our parts. We're gonna battle to now let that happen. But the threat is real to us.
[Gavin] The auto industry has long been a focal point of Trump's tariff policies, but US manufacturing employment has slumped, shutting roughly 58,000 jobs this year through November. The auto industry specifically has lost just over 15,000 jobs. Still, not everyone takes such a dim view of Trump's tariffs. We're here in Warren, Michigan today. It's a hard scrabble suburb of Detroit to talk to workers who work at this assembly plant right here, the Stellantis Warren Truck Assembly plant, where they make the Jeep Wagoneer. There's this plant, and then there's one next door called the Warren Stamping Plant that makes the doors and the hoods that they put on the Wagoneer and other Stellantis vehicles. Stellantis said that they would cut over a thousand jobs at the Warren assembly plant, indefinitely laying off an entire shift of workers. But after Trump made his announcement of his automotive tariffs, they reversed course and said they would bring that shift of workers back and would expand production at other Stellantis facilities as well. And I'm seeing a lot of Stellantis cars in the lot here. I'm not sure how they're gonna feel about my rented Nissan Altima. I sat down with the presidents of two local UAW unions representing Stellantis workers at the Warren facilities as well as the UAWs representative to the company. So guys, tell me a little bit about Warren in Michigan. What is the character of this community here?
Hard work and blue collar town. Many of our employees who work at Warren Truck live in the city of Warren. We have UAW offices here in Warren. We have numerous plants, not just Stellantis, but GM and a couple other plants.
So do you all see the tariffs as the overriding factor for the new investments that you're getting for the new model that you're going to have at the assembly plant?
The UAW is long advocated for auto tariffs, targeted auto tariffs. And up until the tariffs were recently implemented, you know, we faced, you know, major consequences with Warren Truck just over a year ago, lost production of the RAM Classic, losing a shift to production and also what laying off 1,600 of their employees, you know, put on indefinite layoff, you know, flipping those folks' legs upside down. But, you know, with the recent announcements, especially at Eric's plant, they had no future investment at that point in time. And since then, you know, they now have a, what, a new full-sized SUV coming their way that should generate a shift to production there and create roughly 900 jobs.
And the prospect of new business because of these those 900 jobs that investment that's put the prospect of more business for your members too right?
Definitely, anytime you need a vehicle just gonna drive on the floor it's gonna be stampings for it. And to that point, Warren stamping local A69 is extremely excited. They're ready to work, they have the capability we have the white space to do it and they want the work. People are definitely excited about this administration and what's happened, now the tariff has seemed to work very well with the corporation. The corporations are seeing this and I don't know if they take it as a threat or as a guarantee that something will happen if they don't get that work back to the United States and I think our memberships from every facility are waiting on it.
So we visit a parts supplier that make these little fasteners that keep parts connected to the frame of the vehicle. They say that they've paid millions of dollars more this year in tariffs. Are there any implementation issues around it that you think even if we're going in the right direction there are still some maybe some details to be ironed out there?
Well it'd be nice to see all that manufacturing brought back here too, at the end of the day I mean that's the intent of it you know I mean if you're gonna sell it here you need to build it here, I mean that's the bottom line.
Yeah when I first started working for Chrysler in 1994 the big push was buy American, right? And it was even at the point where you couldn't even really park a foreign vehicle in a parking lot. And I just feel like somehow we've gotten away from that. This country has gotten away from that. We can't keep talking about, wow, it would be great if we built that in the United States. Let's start, we have the people, we have the knowhow that's what we do.
[Gavin] Trump and his allies say there will be many more examples like the Warren Assembly plant in the year to come. They predict a golden age for American manufacturing, spurred by the tariffs, Trump's tax law, and lower interest rates. Some of Trump's tariffs are at risk after the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of his authority to impose the broad levies that he unveiled on Liberation Day. But that ruling, which is expected soon, won't help manufacturers like AlphaUSA since they fall under section 232, which is not part of the case.
These aren't just people to us these are families. We will do everything we can to keep those people employed. Of course, we're not gonna have the funding to be able to expand our capital base which we dearly want to do, you know, there's a lot of things that aren't gonna happen if this prevails.