Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was once synonymous with America’s industrial might.
The region was known for its booming manufacturing economy anchored by companies like Mack Trucks and Bethlehem Steel, the latter of which employed over 30,000 workers at its peak in the 1950s.
But manufacturing began to struggle in the 1970s and collapsed by the turn of the century. Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt in 2001 (the site now houses a casino). All of this made the Lehigh Valley into a symbol of the ills of de-industrialization. There’s even a Billy Joel song about it.
President Donald Trump has said his ongoing trade war is meant in large part to bring manufacturing jobs back to communities like this. But, in the Lehigh Valley, it’s having the opposite effect: Last month, Mack Trucks announced it would be laying off about 10 percent of its unionized workers at its Lehigh Valley plant, and pointed to tariffs and the economic uncertainty they’ve caused as the reason.
“We were very surprised,” Mack Trucks employee and UAW Local 677 District 1 Committeeperson Dan Hand told me. “We have people that just started working on the shop floor Monday of last week. … They’re scared.”
When I saw a local news story about these layoffs, I knew I had to drive up to the valley from my home in Philadelphia to talk to Hand and his coworkers in person. I expected them to be mad. But I found a more complicated story — and more complicated feelings about the tariffs.
Last summer, Mack Trucks’ parent company, Volvo, announced it was building a massive new truck plant in Mexico. The company said it planned to supplement its American workforce, not replace it, but Hand and his union members were upset and scared that their jobs, like so many others in their industry, would eventually move south of the border. In March, UAW 577 put out a press release blasting Mack’s decision and endorsing tariffs as a tool to fight it.
Now, even with the impending layoffs, Mack’s Lehigh Valley workforce is split on Trump’s tariff policy. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a good game plan,” said Hand, who voted for Trump in 2016, but then soured on him because of his treatment of organized labor in his first term.
John Taniser, on the other hand, told me short-term pain is worth it for long-term change. He voted for Trump in 2024 and remains confident in the president’s vision.
“It could be a year. It could be two years. But what we’re looking for is a path forward to thrive and not just sustain and exist,” said Taniser, a 27-year veteran of Mack’s production line. “In this economy that we’re in currently, there’s no going forward.”
Nearly all economists agree that it’s unlikely manufacturing will ever play as big a role in the American economy as it did in the mid-20th century. My colleague Dylan Matthews wrote an article recently about how, as countries get richer, they all see manufacturing jobs replaced with service industry jobs.
That was the case across the US over the last century, and that’s true in the Lehigh Valley too: The largest employers in the county now are hospitals and Amazon warehouses. Manufacturing itself has changed over time, too. Even if companies like Mack buck the trend and invest more in the United States, that ultimately won’t translate into many new jobs: As manufacturing technology has improved, factories need fewer and fewer human workers.
But that’s a hard pill to swallow for people in communities that were built around manufacturing and that have suffered from its decline. Many hope tariffs will still, despite what experts say, rewind the clock and reverse that decline.
“Those great jobs — they built the Valley,” Taniser said. “Those workers are the ones who bought all these homes, who shopped at all these stores. It’s not there anymore. And we want to bring it back. I want it back.”
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