Nashville, Ten. – Dru Greenblat is on the board to fully balance a global trade system with the use of the Trump administration, which says that foreign companies are in favor of US manufacturers.
Greenblat is the president and owner of Marlin Steel Wire products in Baltimore in Maryland, which produces baskets and racks for medical device makers, space agencies, food processing companies and others. It has 115 employees and produces products in three places in Maryland, Indiana and Michigan. The steel is encouraged from Tennessee, Illinois and Michigan.
Greenblat says it is hard to compete with baskets now made abroad. Because the countries he is competing against has an “wrong facility”. For example, because of European tariffs and taxes, it spends a lot on buying a marlin wire basket than buying a German -made basket for a German consumer or company, creating an uneven play field, Greenblat says.
“This is wildly wrong to the American worker,” he said. “And it has been going on for decades.”
The Trump administration has called the United States a “economic and national security” priority. US production has been declining for decades. In June 1979, the number of manufacturing workers reached 19.6 million. By January 2025, employment by the Labor Statistics Bureau has decreased from 35% to 12.8 million. Small manufacturers, which are 99%of all American production, especially strictly hit.
The administration has implemented some tariffs against big business partners in the United States, while retaining other tariffs pending for discussion. The Trump administration has said that the tariffs will force companies to make more products to avoid climbing prices in their imports, which means “better payment American jobs” for people to make cars, equipment and other products.
Greenblat agrees, he said that if “equality” was reality in the tariff, he could double his staff.
Other small manufacturing businesses also support tariffs, other owners have concerns. Trump’s tariffs threatened to maintain existing economic discipline and probably to push the global economy to a recession. And the unequal rollout of the policy has created uncertainty for business, financial markets and US families.
For Carrie Blanc, the injection of uncertainty around the economy surpasses any possible benefits.
He started his business in Blanc Creative in Wainsboro, Virginia in 2002. He made bakeware with handcraft kitchen such as skillets and other kitchenware and American steel and Wood and employed 12 employees. He received a plant in South Carolina and his steel from a distributor in Richmond. Wood came from the local regional curtain near the company’s headquarters in Virginia’s Weinsoboro.
He said he was fielding worried calls from customers in Canada and abroad. And he says that when more people start buying American products, there is no place to increase infrastructure production to increase production.
Blanc said he survived the epidemic and other difficult times, but the situation is the most difficult now.
“There is a lot of uncertainty and not many aspects,” he said.
Michael Lyons is the founder of the Disease Industries, a company that produces wallet and other leather products in a workshop in Maine Standish, with nine employees. He uses the skin of Maine and Mid West. About 80% of its products are made in Maine and 20% is imported.
He said uncertainty around the tariff is exceeding any possible long -term benefits. A long -time customer in Canada recently told Leone that he would no longer buy from the mischievous industry because of friction between the two countries.
“Hopefully it will be cut off, and he will be able to come back,” he said. “But I thought it was an interesting index to reach him.”
Lion’s wants to expand his business, but says, “At that time, it is probably going to be, we hold on to what we have.”
The American giant CEO Bayard Winthrop took a more positive view. He founded the textile industry on the coast and the lack of quality, affordable American clothing, he established his garment company in the 21st. He started selling a sweatshirt, and now sells broad clothing, most directly from the direct customer, but he also has a contract with Walmart.
He has dedicated cotton to southeast states like Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, and a factory in North Carolina and a joint partnership in Los Angeles.
“People forget that the garments that Americans bought in 1985 were made in America,” he said. “It has just followed as a country as a country in the last 40 years as a country in the last 40 years.”
According to the statistics of the American Officer and Footwear Association, in 1991, about 56%of our clothing was made in the United States. By 2023 this number has become less than 4%.
Winthrop hopes that tariffs will return to more American -made products.
“The imbalance between our business, especially with China, especially textiles, is just shocked to you,” he added that Trump’s policies were “a little more in the competitive action of domestic manufacturers,” he said.
Winthrop understands people’s anxieties, but have said that it is important to think long -term.
“Americans are concerned about tariffs, and I think there is a lot of justice for anxiety because I think the administration can be unstable and unpredictable,” he said. But he added that people should be left aside.
“We are about to be more protective in our domestic marketplace and have an art policy that includes manufacturing employment, it’s an old idea. This is not a new idea,” he said.
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