A worker at the Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
By Nick Evans
Ohio Capital Journal
Both presidential campaigns are promising to grow jobs by expanding the U.S. manufacturing sector. So what do the people working in that field in Ohio think about their policy plans? We asked factory owners and factory workers around the state.
Former president Donald Trump courted controversy in March during a long digression on automobile manufacturing. He warned there would be a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected.
“If you’re listening President Xi,” Trump said, taking aim at Chinese car plants, “those big, monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now — and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the cars to us?”
“No. We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell them to us,” he insisted.
At the Republican National Convention, Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance tapped into a similar theme as he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. He described how President Joe Biden had supported NAFTA in the early 1990s, China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“At each step of the way,” he argued, “In small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan, in states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war.”
Later, he argued, the U.S. needs a leader who “will stand up for American companies and American industry. A leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.”
The U.S. got a raw deal when it opened itself up to the world through free trade agreements, Trump believes, and now it’s time to get back some of what it lost through aggressive, protectionist trade policies.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has identified the same problem and focused its efforts on the same actor. Many Trump-era tariffs on Chinese goods remain in place or have even been expanded. With the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan infrastructure law, the administration has developed a robust industrial policy aimed at promoting domestic manufacturing in industries where the U.S. is competing with China.
“We have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels,” Harris argued during her debate with Trump last month. “We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president.”
“Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs,” she added. “He lost manufacturing jobs.”
Prior to the pandemic, manufacturing jobs grew at a modest but steady clip. Those figures fell off a cliff in early 2020, and Biden oversaw the industry’s recovery. Moreover, the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and infrastructure law have spurred a surge in factory and other manufacturing construction, with spending reaching $233 billion in April 2024 – more than doubling in the last two years and nearly tripling in the last three.
Nationally, there are now slightly more manufacturing jobs than there were prior to the pandemic. In Ohio, the jobs have rebounded but haven’t quite met their previous level.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Department of Commerce, the industry accounted for 11.4% of the country’s GDP and 9.6% of its workforce in 2022.
An Economic Policy Institute report from 2022 argued wages for non-college educated workers tend to be substantially lower in service industry jobs and the impact has been particularly pronounced for workers of color.
For Ohio workers, the campaigns’ emphasis on manufacturing looks like job security and a shot at the middle class for a generation of workers coming up behind them. To business owners, it’s an opportunity to fortify their position as all sorts of industries look to shorten their supply chains following the pandemic. But while both groups see opportunity, they see different benefits and drawbacks in the candidates’ platforms.
Ohio has a significant manufacturing footprint. By employment, it ranks third in the country behind only the much larger states of Texas and California. When it comes to GDP, Ohio lands fourth. And manufacturing is largest of the state’s economic sectors, representing 15.7% of the state’s output.
“Manufacturing is robust in Ohio,” Ohio Chamber of Commerce Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Tony Long said. “We have final production of anything from vehicles and washers and dryers and all that stuff, but we also then have all of the tiered suppliers that come with it.”
He explained the biggest needs have to do with infrastructure, workforce and the housing and child care necessary for those workers to actually show up.
Looking back over the past two presidential administrations, he credited Biden with passing the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act to “shrink” supply lines following the pandemic, and he praised Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
“There are things that help pass-through entities, which a lot of new corporations are,” Logan explained. “There was bonus depreciation, expensing of certain things, so that allowed folks to go get plant equipment that they needed.”
The only critique he offered was that neither administration had been able to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Notably, early this year Senate Democrats were prepared to move forward with a bipartisan border bill placing restrictions on asylum seekers and investing in border security without the expanded pathway to legal status the party has long sought, but Republicans scuttled the bill at Trump’s urging to ensure the former president could campaign on the issue.
Like Logan, Ross McGregor, a former Republican state representative and owner of a metal fabrication company called Pentaflex, praised Biden’s infrastructure legislation and Trump’s tax cuts.
“And that’s one thing that I’m interested in hearing (from) those who are running for office today,” he said. “How are they going to treat those tax reforms that are set to expire in 2026?”
Although the deductions for pass-through businesses and depreciation provisions are set to expire in 2026, the more substantial reduction of corporate tax rates from 35% to 21% is not sunsetting. The bulk of other expiring provisions have to do with individual taxes.
Pentaflex does a lot of work for the commercial vehicle industry. Bigs sheets of metal come in, and workers press them into components that will be assembled into parts like brakes or axles. McGregor’s father started the company more than 50 years ago, and so to him, rhetoric about reshoring rings a bit hollow — at least in Ohio. He argues the state has long been a leader in manufacturing and it’s only growing. “I mean, I would just point you out to the Intel investment and the Honda EV battery plant,” he said.
And like it or not, McGregor added, the economy is global. “I’m not a fan of tariffs being used in in a weaponized way,” he explained. McGregor expressed frustration with Trump for imposing them (and promising more if elected) and with Biden for maintaining them. He argued the policy raises costs for his raw materials and then makes it harder for him to export his finished products.
“I sell product into Mexico, I sell product into Europe, into Asia,” he said. “So, I mean, it’s something that could impact our profitability here.”
In addition to frustration with Trump’s trade policies, McGregor says he’s been “appalled” at how the campaign has vilified Haitian migrants.
Pentaflex is based in Springfield. McGregor’s cousin Jamie runs another manufacturing business in town and has faced death threats for defending the Haitian community. After the pandemic, he explained, it was difficult to find employees who would show up to work or wouldn’t just “go on break and walk out the door and disappear.” In contrast, Haitian workers showed up eager to work and to do their job well.
“They wanted all the hours they could possibly get, you know,” McGregor said.
He acknowledges there are “stress points” when a large group moves to a new place, particularly when there’s a language barrier. “We’re addressing those,” he said. “But the rhetoric that we hear out from the campaign trail is unnecessary and not helpful.”
The workers who show up each day in manufacturing plants sit at an interesting political crossroads. Leaders of labor organization see the Biden administration as the most supportive one in their lifetimes, and they haven’t forgotten the plant closures that happened under Trump’s leadership. But among the working-class men and women that fill out union ranks Trump gets higher marks.
UAW Local 14 President Tony Totty represents workers at the General Motor plant in Toledo and he laments the fact “your ideology going into the race dictates what media you’re watching.”
“So, when you look at it, the UAW endorsed Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, (U.S. Sen.) Sherrod, Brown, (U.S. Rep.) Marcy Kaptur,” Totty explained, ticking off the Democratic slate of high-profile candidates in Northwest Ohio. “Do we have members that are going to vote for Donald Trump, Derek Merrin and Bernie Moreno? Yes, we do, but it’s not because of union fundamentals.”
Totty criticized Republican U.S. House nominee Derek Merrin for referencing “union jobs” in a campaign ad — “He supports right to work,” Totty said, puzzled — and he knocked GOP U.S. Senate nominee Bernie Moreno for selling Chinese-made Buicks.
When it comes to tariffs, Totty is more amenable than McGregor.
“I’m for fair trade, not free trade,” he said, arguing U.S. workers can’t compete with low wage workers in other parts of the world. He credited Trump with having the right idea when he took on China, but argued Trump failed in the execution.
David Green, who serves as UAW’s region 2B director for Ohio and Indiana, echoed that point.
“If we had good fair trade, then the tariffs wouldn’t really matter, and maybe the tariffs are part of that good fair trade,” he said, adding, “we don’t want to put tariffs on everything, because then our inflation goes up again.”
Auto worker at a Chrysler plant in Ohio
A worker at the Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
As for critiques, Green and Totty both brought up plant closures and job losses. But despite high profile cases like GM’s Lordstown plant, prior to March of 2020, manufacturing employment grew modestly in the state. Totty’s only criticism of Biden was that he may have pressed rail workers to accept a deal that fell short of what they were seeking.
Green and Totty both praised the Biden administration’s record on industrial policy, including infrastructure legislation, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Totty in particular brought up Biden’s executive action to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs — the same idea Trump was talking about when he made that bloodbath comment back in March.
“This is the biggest transformation in our industry since its inception, and how we deal with this moment matters and will define us going into the future,” he argued. “So, if we’re going to spend trillions of dollars in this country to make these EVs go, those are our jobs — not China, not Mexico.”
Pressed on the fact Trump has proposed the same policy, Totty insisted “it’s actions, not words” that matter. He pointed to the closure of GM’s facility in Lordstown after Trump told workers there not to sell their homes.
Shuttering that plant “sprayed” workers all across the country, but Totty argued some have been able to go home thanks to the Biden administration. He explained the Inflation Reduction Act incentivized a new battery plant in Lordstown, and that the union was able to wrap that new facility into its latest contract agreement.
“I don’t know if they would know the backstory of that,” Totty explained. “I don’t know if they would know that the whole reason why they’re at home right now is because of the Inflation Reduction Act and because we got the support from the administration to get a better deal so those battery facilities would be in our agreement.”
Green meanwhile emphasized the importance of simple communication. He described a Department of Energy rule that had workers at a Zanesville steel plant spooked.
“So, what do we do?” Green said, “We call the DOE, and they pick up the phone, right?”
The union and the steel company Cleveland-Cliffs were able to convince the agency to modify the rule.
“We don’t get everything we wanted, but our members are going to be able to keep their jobs there in Zanesville, Ohio,” he said. “Their jobs are going to be secure because we were able to have a conversation with the president’s administration where, with Trump, there was no discussion about anything, let alone policy.”
“Having a voice at the table,” Green said, “having someone pick up the phone and listen is priceless.”
Nick Evans has spent the past seven years reporting for NPR member stations in Florida and Ohio.
