Until everything came to a halt in mid-March, Jon Bird worked 12-hour shifts, four days a week — shoveling rock, hosing mud and operating enormous iron ore crushers at a mine in northern Minnesota.
The mines in the state’s Iron Range, where Mr. Bird was born and raised — and where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the pits before him — sit atop a domestic supply funnel. The ore, extracted and crushed, is further processed, shipped, smelted in a blast furnace, transformed into steel, then taken to assembly lines, where it is shaped into appliances and automobiles.
But demand for cars and other big-ticket, metal-filled items slumped in 2024, a rough year for the industry. The steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs, which owns the mine where Mr. Bird works, reported a $483 million loss for the first three months of 2025, which meant jobs were on the line, including his.
When Mr. Bird, 33, found out that he was being laid off, he did not hear it from “Cliffs.” he said. Rather, he learned about it in a breaking news segment on the local television station, WDIO, while with his children on one of his days off. Some 1,200 Cleveland-Cliffs employees were affected, 600 them in Minnesota.
“It’s a hell of a way to find out you’re losing your job,” he said. “It feels like a slap in the face, honestly, from corporate America.”
Yet one thing currently uniting Cleveland-Cliffs and Mr. Bird, a member of the United Steelworkers union, is support for President Trump’s tariffs: a 25 percent tax on steel and aluminum imports along with a 25 percent tariff on all imported cars.
A wide range of economists think that Mr. Trump’s global tariff campaign could hasten an economic downturn, even as he has rolled back its most extreme, across-the-board elements over the past month. A prolonged downturn, or mere slowdown, could further dampen demand for steel products.
Both the steel companies and the steelworkers’ union, however, believe that tariffs can help protect, and even revitalize, domestic production over the long run. Fending off consistently lower-priced Chinese steel — produced with cheaper labor and state subsidies — is a stated aim of the White House.
Mr. Bird said that he didn’t get why Mr. Trump wanted to tax everything from coffee to mangoes, but that steel tariffs made sense to him because of the availability — even a current surplus — of homegrown ore.
“America imports a bunch of stuff from everyone because we just don’t have everything,” he said. “But maybe we should stop trying to get things that we already have from everywhere else and just do it here, you know?”
Still, the lines between hurting foreign trade adversaries and helping domestic production are blurry in the modern economy. While tariffs are expected to dampen the American appetite for Chinese steel this year, according to analysts at S&P Global Commodity Insights, American steel and auto producers are also being hit with higher costs for the imported parts and finished goods that they use.
People in support of tariffs are making a bet, to one extent or another, that the domestic ecosystem of mining workers and steel companies can survive what the president calls “a transition” and come out the better for it.
“We firmly believe that the Trump administration is spot-on in its push to bring back manufacturing to the United States” in the long term, Lourenco Goncalves, the chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, told analysts on a recent earnings call. “However, in the short term, we need to do everything we can to make sure that we remain cost competitive.”
That means the months ahead will be trickier than usual for people like Mr. Bird. His family will “hunker down” with unemployment benefits and a layoff supplement from the steelworkers’ union until Mr. Bird’s wife, who is finishing nursing school, starts looking for work this summer.
But if the demand for American steel doesn’t increase, “well, then you’re faced with the decision of ‘I might have to leave,’” Mr. Bird said. “You know, at our union meetings, they told us the harsh reality of ‘You might not see some of these people ever again.’”
A Trickle-Down Economy
The chatter around the mining towns of St. Louis County is that most miners may not be called back to work until the winter holidays, or potentially well after that if auto sales fail to reaccelerate soon. In preparation, Minnesota legislators are debating proposals to extend the miners’ unemployment insurance benefits until late December, beyond the usual 26 weeks.
Keeping skilled miners in the region is a bipartisan priority, from the office of the Democratic governor, Tim Walz, in the state capital in St. Paul to red rural stretches far north. Mining has a small footprint in terms of total employment in the state. But the fear is that if mining withers away in the face of foreign competition, then much of northern Minnesota may end up hollowed out like some other parts of the upper Midwest.
“If we do not get this extension and provide hope to our members, they will not be able to stay, as a lot of them are young, with children,” Al King, the president of United Steelworkers Local 6115, said during a state legislative committee hearing in April.
A common complaint by economists about protectionist policies is that the “wage premium” for most manufacturing jobs is often overstated and that populist nostalgia for a bygone manufacturing heyday is misplaced. But unionized mining jobs in the Iron Range still pay well.
Mr. Bird makes anywhere from $112,000 to $125,000 a year with overtime. That is well over the per capita income of $39,778 in St. Louis County, or the $61,140 typical of someone working in maintenance and repair jobs.
“Mining is a trickle-down economy,” said Teresa Appelwick, the president of the Laurentian Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses in the “Quad Cities” of the range and “does not have an official stance” on Mr. Trump’s tariff campaign.
The longer miners are idled, she said, the more the next-best-paying jobs may falter because much of their business ripples out from mining activity: welders, metal fabricators, equipment distributors, construction firms, tire companies, heating and cooling systems operators, pipe fitters.
Darrell Gustafson, 50, from Hibbing, Minn., worked in construction for much of his life. But the past 13 years as a miner offered a salary that put him on a trajectory to comfortably manage retirement. He felt “blindsided,” he said, when he was laid off in March.
Grabbing lunch with his girlfriend at Sportsmen’s, a main street haunt in Hibbing, he lamented how the auto and appliances markets had “tanked.” Yet he, too, is in support of high steel tariffs.
“Everyone’s shocked at having tariffs, but why was it OK for them to free trade but we get charged for our goods overseas?” Mr. Gustafson said. He did add, however, that the rollout of tariff policy so far left “a lot of unanswered questions.”
Diversifying the Economy
Dozens of employers showed up at the 2025 Iron Range Job Fair on April 24. Representatives from the forestry sector and dental offices, from the community college and truck dealerships, all came. A few hundred job seekersdid, too. A “sprinkle” of miners stopped by, said Ms. Appelwick of the Chamber of Commerce, which was among the hosts of the event. But most laid-off miners are waiting it out, hoping to return to the good job that many feel they still have.
Mining is a cyclical industry, and people in the region have grown somewhat accustomed to drastic dips over the years. That reality has led many longtime residents to push for a diversification of the regional economy.
Miriam Kero is a consultant and the coordinator of Hello, Range, a nonprofit group seeking to broaden the economy. She looks to tourism, with Maine — another Northern state filled with lakes, hills, wild game and wetlands — as a guide.
“When the ore resource is gone, or if it’s not economically feasible because the competition is doing it cheaper and better, or whatever, or when the economics no longer work, then what are we going to do?” Ms. Kero asked.
Her spouse, Peter Kero, an environmental engineer and author, is also the architect of Redhead Mountain Bike Park, home to 27 miles of biking and hiking trails, carved from the remade walls of an old mining pit. (The name comes from the soil’s red hue, colored by oxidized iron.)
Opened in 2021, Redhead has hosted the high school state championship for mountain biking in two of the past three years. The event drew “a couple thousand riders and their families, filling all the hotel rooms from here to Duluth,” Ms. Kero said.
In the Iron Range, “tourism has always kind of been like pooh-poohed, or seen as lesser than, because you’re talking typically about these service jobs,” Ms. Kero said. Many hospitality jobs, she acknowledged, do not always pay well enough to save and raise families — even in an area with a low cost of living compared with big metro areas. Food preparation and serving jobs in the area pay around $33,000; grounds cleaning around $41,000.
“Maybe it’s like this in other places, too, but around here, most people have a second or third side gig,” she said.
The Potential for Shipbuilding
At the entrance to a mining museum in Chisholm is an 85-foot-tall “Iron Man” monument, topped by a chiseled miner holding a pick and shovel — a memorial to the achievements and historical lore of the professional extractors in the pits.
Minnesota iron built skyscrapers and railroads, backed by titans of industry like the Carnegies and Rockefellers. In World War II, its iron became tanks, planes and ships that won battles.
The hope around the Iron Range is that the industry is not soon relegated to a museum artifact.
President Trump has vowed to bring back some of the grand-scale manufacturing. In April, he signed an executive order aimed at bulking up the atrophied U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry, which has been outcompeted globally, especially by China.
Speaking in the Oval Office during the signing, he promised “a lot of money on shipbuilding” to come. And a bipartisan group of senators — led by Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Democrat, and Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a Republican — has pledged to follow up with legislative proposals.
The potential for more domestic shipbuilding could mean a greater market for American-made steel. The mere possibility of that shift has excited plenty of members in the United Steelworkers union.
Over burgers at Palmers Tavern, a place in Hibbing for hockey watch parties, Mr. Bird said he had heard of the shipbuilding proposals.
And he declared himself a fan.
“I’m biased as a miner,” he laughed. “But I think that’d be a great idea.”
Talmon Joseph Smith is a Times economics reporter, based in New York.
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