The Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania was once synonymous with American industrial power.
The region was known for its booming manufacturing economy, fixed by companies such as Mack Trucks and Bethlehem Steel, which employed more than 30,000 workers during its peak in the 1950s.
However, manufacturing began to struggle in the 1970s and collapsed at the turn of the century. Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt in 2001 (currently the site has a casino). All this has made Lehigh Valley a symbol of industrialisation disease. There's even a Billy Joel song about it.
President Donald Trump said his ongoing trade war was intended largely to bring manufacturing jobs back to such communities. But in Lehigh Valley, it has the opposite effect. Last month, MacTrack announced that it would fire around 10% of its union workers at the Lehigh Valley factory, pointing to the tariffs and economic uncertainty they caused as reasons.
“We were very surprised,” a MacTruck employee and UAW Local 677 District 1 Committeperson Dan Hand told me. “There were people who just started working on the field last Monday. … They're scary.”
When I saw local news stories about these layoffs, I knew I had to drive from my home in Philadelphia to the valley and talk to his colleagues in person. I was hoping they would be mad. But I found a more complicated story – and more complicated feelings about tariffs.
Last summer, Volvo, the parent company of Mac Trucks, announced that it would build a large new truck factory in Mexico. The company said it plans to supplement the American workforce rather than replacing it, but the hand and his union members were upset and scared that their work, like many others in their industry, would eventually move south of the border. In March, UAW 577 issued a press release in support of tariffs as a tool to blow up and combat Mac's decision.
Now, despite the imminent layoffs, the workforce at Mack's Lehigh Valley is split into Trump's tariff policies. “It doesn't seem like there's a good game plan,” said Hand, who voted for Trump in 2016, but in his first term he got worse on him due to the treatment of organized labor.
Meanwhile, John Tanniser said short-term pain is worthwhile for long-term changes. He voted for Trump in 2024 and is confident in his vision for the president.
“It could be a year, it could be two years. But what we're looking for is a path to not only maintaining and existing, but also thriving.” “There's no progress in this economy we're in.”
Almost every economist agrees that manufacturing is unlikely to play a major role in the American economy, just like in the mid-20th century. My colleague Dylan Matthews recently wrote an article on how manufacturing jobs can replace services jobs as countries become more prosperous.
That was true throughout the United States of the last century, and that is also true in the Lehigh Valley. Currently, the largest employers in the county are hospitals and Amazon warehouses. The manufacturing itself has also changed over time. Even if a company like Mac defies trends and invests more in the US, it won't eventually translate into many new jobs. With improved manufacturing techniques, factories need to have fewer human workers.
But it is a difficult medicine to swallow for people in the community, built around manufacturing and struggling with its decline. Despite what experts say, tariffs still hope to rewind the clock and reverse that decline.
“These great jobs – they built the valley,” Taniser said. “These workers are the people who bought all these houses who shopped at all these houses. It's not there anymore. And we want to get it back. I want to get it back.”
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