Word that the steel mill in Granite City was restarting a blast furnace resonated as a sign of American industrial revival.
The Trump administration had placed stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum. This was supposed to choke imports and force production back to American factories. And here, at a hulking complex on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, was ostensible evidence that the strategy was working. U.S. Steel, the owner of the mill, would hire some 400 additional union workers.
“These tariffs have helped,” said Braden Morris, who was laid off from his job at the mill in late 2023, and had just been recalled. “It’s proof that we’re coming back.”
Yet 500 miles to the north, in the deep freeze of St. Paul, Minn., those same tariffs spelled something different for Eric Hawkins. His family-owned company, Park Tool, manufactures gadgets used to repair bicycles, and exports them around the globe. The tariffs have increased the cost of the steel and aluminum he uses to make his products. That has forced him to lift his prices by 10 percent, flattening sales growth.
“Every one of our suppliers has raised prices over the past year,” Mr. Hawkins complained. “Trump thinks it’s so easy to say, ‘We’re going to make the costs so high that you have to bring the jobs back.’ But I’m saddled with a much higher materials cost.”
And that was before the latest upheaval in American trade policy: the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday that President Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs — those levied against scores of countries at once — had exceeded his authority.
That decision confronted American business with an overwhelming assortment of variables and prompted Mr. Trump to immediately resort to a new 15 percent global tariff using a different legal mechanism. It also made the steel tariffs, which were not implicated in the court case, a more prominent fixture of trade policy.
“The Supreme Court ruling, bad law though it was, significantly strengthens every other statutory authority that President Trump has on tariffs,” said Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, in an email response to questions. He cited the section of the law used as the basis for imposing levies on steel. “The steel tariffs are rock solid and a linchpin of an industry essential to our national security.”
Mr. Trump has cast the protection of the American steel industry as the centerpiece of his mission to rejuvenate domestic factory production. But the troubles of Park Tool highlight how tariffs have so far hindered that cause, jeopardizing jobs that are already here.
Protectionism has increased the price of steel available in the United States while spurring only a modest increase in domestic production. That has left companies like Park Tool reliant on global supply chains they have built up over decades. Thousands of specialty components needed to make their products are now more expensive.
Manufacturers are also contending with a foreign backlash to the Trump administration’s wider trade war, undermining the appeal of the Made in America brand. Not least, they are grappling with paperwork nightmares as they navigate constantly changing tariff rates and customs procedures.
The Trump administration asserts that disruption is the unavoidable cost of reinvigorating steel towns like Granite City. But that characterization collides with the arithmetic of American manufacturing. For every person employed at a domestic steel mill, 80 work at factories that buy steel, according to a paper by the economists Kadee Russ and Lydia Cox.
Tariffs during Mr. Trump’s first term produced an additional 1,000 jobs at steel mills while eliminating 75,000 positions throughout manufacturing, the two economists calculated in another paper.
Steel industry officials argue that such formulations leave out vital context.
“If you don’t have steel production in your country, then you’re at the mercy of steel producers in other countries,” said Kevin Dempsey, president of the American Iron and Steel Institute, a trade association in Washington.
He cast Mr. Trump’s tariffs as an overdue correction to surges of steel flowing into the United States, much of it unfairly cheap by dint of subsidies.
In 2016, the year before Mr. Trump’s first term, about 71 percent of American steel capacity was in use, according to industry data. By 2019, with steel tariffs in place, that figure had risen to 80 percent, and has remained above 75 percent ever since. Over the same time, imports as a share of total steel used in the United States dropped to 19 percent from 27 percent.
Yet even as American imports of steel have been reduced, the total production has stayed flat in the United States.
From 2019 to 2025, domestic production of steel dipped from 97 million tons per year to 90 million tons, though last year saw a slight increase compared to the previous year, according to data compiled by the American Iron and Steel Institute.
Experts assert that tariffs have allowed the industry to skimp on investment while benefiting from higher domestic prices. Steel sold in the United States is currently about 30 percent more expensive than in Europe, and almost double the price in China, noted Kyle Handley, an economist at the University of California, San Diego.
Granite City is a testament to the forces of downward mobility that have in recent decades afflicted American industrial communities. Brick buildings sit forlorn, their masonry crumbling. Dollar stores and payday lenders fill out retail spaces. At the downtown headquarters of United Steelworkers Local 1899, footsteps echo through empty hallways.
Three years ago, before the layoffs, the union branch represented 1,400 local workers. In December, just before the furnace restart was announced, that number was down to 764. Now, some of the people sent home two years ago are being recalled.
“Those tariffs have been part of putting steel where it is by creating demand for American steel,” said the local president, Craig McKey.
Eric Addison, 34, had just returned to the mill. He grew up in Granite City and had long aspired to a job as a steelworker.
“This place was the talk of the town,” he said. “You’d ask anyone who had a nice house or a car and they’d say, ‘Yeah, we work at the steel mill.’”
Just before he was laid off, he had been promoted to the job of ladleman, operating the controls of the equipment that regulates the flow of molten steel. He was making more than $29 an hour. “It was the best money I’d ever made,” Mr. Addison said.
After the layoff in October 2023, he took a job at a barge company that ships animal feed down the Mississippi. It paid less than $22 an hour. He stopped going out to eat. He eliminated bowling night. “Basically, I just went to work and came home,” he said.
Then, in December, he saw a post on Facebook announcing that the blast furnace was coming back online. Almost immediately, the company called and asked him to come back. He would start at $31.20 an hour.
“I was pretty excited,” he said.
Many local mill workers credited the change of leadership in Washington. “In this town, we were always told that we make the best steel, but getting cheap steel coming in was hurting us,” said Martin Cooper, a 57-year-old father of four who was recently recalled. “People say that Trump came back and the steel mill opened back up.”
But the same conditions that have stoked confidence in Granite City are sowing worries across the American factory floor.
Mr. Hawkins, 63, the chief executive of Park Tool, has come to expect rising fortunes. Over the last quarter-century, he took the bike shop started by his father and a partner and turned it into one of the world’s largest makers of bicycle tools. The company exports more than half its production to some 70 countries, including China.
But these days, he and his team of 70 people are grappling with the effects of Mr. Trump’s trade war. Time they would rather spend designing new products is consumed by studying tariff schedules and preparing customs paperwork.
“It’s just a lot of hassle,” Mr. Hawkins said. “We should be in a growth pattern. We’re not.”
Old Schwinn bicycles fill racks near the factory entrance, displaying the roots of the business. But the present is underscored by the studio where the company records bicycle repair videos that it posts on YouTube to get the word out about its products.
As Mr. Hawkins wandered his plant on a recent morning, he stopped at a workbench where a worker wielded a hand-held drill to attach parts to a so-called torque limiter — a wrench designed to prevent a person from applying damaging amounts of force. One part, a blue-tinted hunk of metal shaped like a handle, had been cast at a plant in Iowa. Another had been produced through injection molding in the Twin Cities.
These were the elements of a factory that has managed to remain in the United States despite the perpetual tug of cheaper labor in Asia.
Yet lately, Mr. Hawkins has found himself navigating new challenges. A distributor in Germany recently told him that many of his European customers, angry over the Trump administration’s attempts to take control of Greenland while weakening its support for Ukraine, are refusing to buy American products. The distributor has shifted some of its orders to a factory in Slovenia.
Mr. Hawkins is tormented by talk of tariffs boosting American manufacturing. His own operation has developed a supply chain that taps domestic sources for most of his parts and materials. But some 3,500 components come from Asia, most of them from Taiwan. No one can recreate that easily.
He pointed at a stack of aluminum parts that sat waiting to be attached to rods to form a bicycle repair stand. The piece that held the bike frame was made in Taiwan. Making the mold there costs about $15,000, compared with $80,000 or $90,000 in the United States, he said.
“There’s so many moving parts here that all have to work together,” he said. “We’ve invested 60 years in figuring all this out, and it works. I’m not going to just dump that.”
And as Mr. Hawkins tried to make sense of the implications of the Supreme Court decision, he anticipated still more tariffs in response.
“Who knows?” he said. “Everything could change tomorrow, right?”
Peter S. Goodman is a reporter who covers the global economy. He writes about the intersection of economics and geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the consequences for people and their lives and livelihoods.
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