Manufacturer sending US jobs to Mexico thanks to Trump's trade war

More than 150 Chicago-area workers will soon receive pink slips and see their jobs shipped off to Mexico, all thanks to Trump’s senseless trade war.

Stack-On Products, which manufactures storage safes that are sold to large retailers like Walmart, has announced it’s shuttering two Illinois factories in October.

The 153 jobs from those factories will be moved to a facility in Juarez, Mexico.

The job-killing decision, the Chicago Tribune reports, “was made about two months ago when President Donald Trump announced tariffs on numerous goods and materials from China as well as other countries.”

Earlier this month, Element Electronics announced that virtually all the workers at its Winnsboro, South Carolina, plant will be laid off in coming weeks, also thanks to Trump.

Outcomes like these are why Trump’s tariffs are nearly universally opposed by economists and big business alike.

Many Republicans also publicly condemn them.

Appearing on MSNBC Thursday morning, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) warned that if Trump’s trade war “is not successful, this is going to be an epic problem for us for a very long time on our economy.”

But Trump’s trade war is already an epic problem for the many U.S. manufacturers that have been slammed with higher production costs.

In recent weeks, major American manufacturers such as Whirlpool, General Motors, and Harley-Davison have all warned that Trump’s short-sighted trade war will likely take big chunks out of their bottom lines, which could mean major layoffs.

In July, soft drink giant Coca-Cola suddenly announced that it has to raise prices on its sodas because, thanks to Trump, it now costs more for Coke to produce aluminum cans.

And in June, the largest nail manufacturer in America, Mid-Continent Nail, located in a Missouri county that voted 79 percent for Trump, warned that its employees might all be out of work by Labor Day because the company simply cannot survive the new tariffs.

Meanwhile, fishermen in the red state of Alaska are bracing for plummeting sales. The escalating trade war with China could be “devastating” to the state’s seafood industry, Frances Leach, executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska, recently told Reuters.

By a 2-to-1 margin, voters think Trump’s tariffs will hurt consumers rather than protect the U.S. economy, a recent NBC News/WSJ poll found.

Trump’s trade war just isn’t working.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.