A Working-Class Response to Tariffs
April 1, 2025
by Stephen Edwards, Dustin Spence, and Justin Smeltzer
The Trump administration has committed to imposing 25% tariffs on all imported vehicles and vehicle parts starting April 2nd. They're already imposing a massive 50% tariff on imported steel and aluminum and further charges are in the works; in most cases there is currently no US supplier to fill the gap. Trump argues that these taxes on imported steel, aluminum, auto and other products will force companies to move factories to the USA or build new ones here. It's true that tariffs have sometimes been used by capitalist governments to help build up an industry, along with tax breaks or other freebies to the corporations. But in this case it's very clear that there is no plan to do this, only the threat to impose these enormous tariffs for the indefinite future.
It's estimated that the average cost of a vehicle will go up by between $3,000 and an eye-popping $15,000. This plan will be devastating for working people because a tariff is effectively a sales tax in which the importer pays the government a percentage of the price coming off the boat, and will recoup the tax by raising the final price at the dealership. This will mean less products purchased, bringing more layoffs, with a high probability that this will lead to a recession, with even more factories closing. This is already happening; steelmaker Cleveland Cliffs has laid off more than 1,200 steel and mine workers in Michigan and Minnesota due to the disruption caused by the tariffs.
Workers should not pay for this crisis.
In a recession, it is working-class people who are subjected to layoffs, unemployment, loss of income and healthcare, in other words, a wave of devastation in exactly the working class communities that Trump claims to be "saving". What we are seeing is a war between different sections of the ruling class in which the side that favors free trade agreements has for the time being lost out to a side that seeks to end them, using appeals to nationalism to deflect our attention from the failure of the system of capitalism to meet our basic needs. Neither side has any intention of raising working-class living standards. The Trump administration is demolishing health & safety protections, labor rights and environmental regulations, laying off thousands of Federal workers and targeting Social Security and Medicare.
Democrats won't save us
Working people won't win by choosing sides between Trump and the Democrats. What is needed is an organized fightback from working-class people to fight for the things we need. Enraged constituents who are showing up at Republican elected officials' town hall meetings and by the tens of thousands turning out for Bernie Sanders' red state rallies are showing that there is a boiling anger at the Trump Administration’s attacks on working people. But Bernie offers no way forward except to “vote Blue” in the midterms. We can't put our faith in the Democratic Party to offer any real opposition. We need to fight back now, independently of the two major parties, and the elected leadership of the labor unions needs to step up and give leadership.
Labor's Response to Tariffs
Disgracefully, one of America's most prominent union leaders, the UAW's president Shawn Fain, whose response to Trump's destruction of union rights for 700,000 Federal workers was no more than a press release, is applauding the Trump Administration for “stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades.” This is a stunning reversal from the same union leader who called Trump a “Scab” during the election. Fain was wrong to campaign for strikebreakers and immigrant-haters Biden and Harris then, and he's wrong to support Trump now. Fain goes on to say that he will “work with any politician, regardless of party” to achieve better conditions for the working-class. This type of leadership is leading workers into a dead end. The capitulation of labor leaders to both of the corporate parties is exactly what has led to the “decades of working-class people going backwards in the most profitable times in our nation's history” to quote Fain. This is why Workers Strike Back calls for a new party for working people that fights the bosses and their spokespeople like Donald Trump and Shawn Fain. Unions should never “work” with the politicians who sell out workers. That includes both Democrats and Republicans.
While “working” with Trump, Fain regrettably neglects the fact that Trump has already fired members of the NLRB and over 130,000 Federal workers! In the past few days Trump has taken union rights away from up to a million more with a single Executive Order! This sledgehammer taken to the federal workforce of this country will mean no enforcement of laws and regulations that working people fought for in past struggles. This includes protecting union rights, clean air and water, airline safety and food and drug inspections and ongoing medical research.
The labor movement should be furious. Trump and his team of billionaires have begun an all out assault on working people and we should be seeing this as a declaration of war. Labor leaders should be calling for mass mobilizations to mass protests and strike action to fight back against Trump’s tariff plans and his brutal crackdown on student anti-war activists. We need militant labor action now and if the labor leaders won’t call for a strike then rank-and-file union members need to come together and organize pressure for a strike vote. This is what is needed to bring down Trump, the Billionaires, and their system.
Tariffs aren't about protecting jobs
In the course of Trump's numerous flip-flops in his negotiations with the governments of Canada and Mexico he has justified the tariff threat for reasons that have nothing to do with jobs and imports, but instead a series of racist tirades against immigrants, blaming them for the USA's homegrown epidemic of drug abuse as well as other, largely imaginary crimes. These attacks, which are a ramped-up continuation of the mass deportations under Bush, Obama and Biden, are an attack on working-class people. They include, with bipartisan support, a broader attack on democratic rights, beginning with non-citizens but extending to anyone who the government deems threatening with ICE making up the law as it goes along. This is an attack on due process and freedom of speech and association for everyone who stands up to them - including union and political activists. And it's all linked to a pro-business, nationalist and imperialist agenda of which tariffs are just one part, but in which Trump stands to personally profit - as demonstrated by his offer to reduce tariffs on Chinese goods in return for a deal for one of his allies to buy TikTok. This again contradicts the story that tariffs are about protecting American jobs.
US-China trade war
The rush towards a trade war is a reflection of the dangerous and deepening rivalry between the US and China, in which both ruling classes are preparing for potential armed conflict. Liberals are mocking Trump and Vance for their saber-rattling towards Canada, Greenland and Panama but their administration is deadly serious about all three, with Canada and Greenland standing between the US and Russia across the Arctic ocean and the Panama Canal forming a vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In this conflict driven by the need to maximize corporate profits, the working class would suffer the most no matter which side "wins" - assuming winning is even possible - and this is one more colossal reason why the working class should oppose everything connected with it, with all our strength.
Furthermore, tariffs will result in massive unemployment in Mexico and Canada as well as the US. When union leaders like Fain make their calls for American jobs conditional on inflicting mass unemployment and underemployment in other parts of the world, they are openly making the US labor movement complicit with imperialism; again, the absolute opposite of solidarity.
The UAW's past support for tariffs lent support to nationalism
This is a replay of the role of the UAW leadership in the 80's when instead of going to war with the Reagan administration's attacks on organized labor, or even defending their own contracts effectively, they launched a massive "Buy American" campaign which never saved a single job but legitimized the kind of racist and nationalist thinking that created a base for Trumpism in the working class - undoing the once strong role that the UAW had played in support of the Southern civil rights movement which opposed racist divisions head on.
Those "Buy American" campaigns always had a racist tinge, even resulting in attacks on Asian-Americans, in at least one case fatally. UAW leaders repeated the corporate propaganda that the reason the imports were selling was due to "cheap labor" elsewhere - despite the fact that in Japan and Germany where most imports came from at that time, the workers were unionized, had decent pay and had far better healthcare and overall quality of life. The underlying crisis was that US manufacturers were refusing to invest in research and development of new products and new equipment, but there was always a political purpose - to destroy the power of workers on the shop floor and in their communities, and to draw the union leadership more deeply into collaborating with the employers. The demand to block imports, whether through quotas or tariffs, was a nationalistic, xenophobic demand that pitted US workers against workers in other countries at the same time as it empowered class collaborationist ideas within the union itself.
Instead of taking on the corporations and their political system for refusing to provide decent healthcare, housing or education, union leaders in the 80's and 90's made the terrible mistake of claiming that the foreign workers were non-union and therefore didn't deserve our solidarity, and in this way they played into the hands of their own employers.
This is the process that Team Fain is replicating now. A year and a half ago, the UAW leaders stepped to the front of the union leadership with their call for a general strike of all workers on May 1st 2028. Today, their support for Trump and their failure to fight these massive attacks on the working class makes a mockery of that call.
Union leaders like Shawn Fain and Sean O'Brien support Trump's anti-immigrant and nationalist policies, which helps the ruling class divide us; it's the opposite of working class solidarity.
What labor's response should be
Instead of praising Trump's policies, union leaders like Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien should be calling for an end to the tariff war, because it will only result in increased prices and economic chaos, and is a prelude to real wars. There is no capitalist solution to the problems created by NAFTA and other "free" trade agreements.
A working-class solution would not be imposing massive tariffs to try to lure companies to bring work back to the USA; it would be for employers to be banned from closing or moving factories to low-wage areas or countries. There is more than enough need in society for full employment to provide the things we need - like housing, healthcare, mass transit, green energy and rebuilding an antiquated, collapsing infrastructure- without inflicting the social disruption and injustice that would result from moving factories from Canada, Mexico or anywhere else to US soil.
Where new factories are needed, they should be located in areas where factories have been closed, in order to rebuild communities that have been ravaged by layoffs, with brownfield sites prioritized for minimal impact on the environment.
Unions should also be organizing cross-border solidarity at a rank-and-file level. Workers' delegations should be elected at factories in the US to visit affected plants and towns in Mexico, Canada, and other affected countries. Workers Strike Back fights for the maximum possible unity of workers, no matter where they live, against the bosses.
Workers Strike Back fully recognizes the need to protect working-class jobs and to remove the motivation for manufacturers to exploit low wages elsewhere. But the point of Workers Strike Back is to build working-class power, not to try to maneuver between our political enemies, the two parties of big business.
Our program includes taking corporations into public ownership, with the goal of democratically deciding what is produced, and how it is produced. Clearly, a democratic, worker-led government would have plenty to say about where it is produced and what workers should be paid for producing it.
But right now we don't own or control anything. Tariffs are presently proposed by both corporate parties as a way to shift taxation from the rich to the working class - Trump has boasted that they will replace income taxes with what is effectively an absolutely massive sales tax, the most regressive form of taxation imaginable short of a poll tax. These ideas are based in American nationalism and xenophobia and are being pushed in a blatantly racist manner by the corporate parties.
The alternative to the bosses’ attacks on immigrants, and to anti-worker “free trade” agreements like NAFTA, is for the labor movement to launch mass organizing drives and build fighting unions not only in the United States, but also around the world. We must combat the bosses’ race to the bottom which seeks to pit workers in different nations against each other. Instead of corporate globalization, economic nationalism, and imperialism, we need working-class internationalism. We need to build a militant international labor movement to unite all workers in the fight for living wages and good working conditions for all.