It’s completely decimated the manufacturing base in this country, and it’s a big reason why we have the situation politically we have right now. When I grew up in Kokomo, Indiana, General Motors was a major employer there. As a child growing up, most of my family worked there — two of my grandparents, aunts and uncles. There were 15–17,000 jobs in GM, just in my small town at that time.

When NAFTA was put in place in 1994, you started to see those jobs disappear. And not just there, but all over the Midwest, all over this country. Since NAFTA’s inception, over 90,000 manufacturing plants have disappeared in this country. When you talk about auto in particular . . . the Economic Policy Institute did a study years ago. For every 100 automotive jobs, there are 700 secondary jobs born out of them. So when those 100 auto jobs disappear, 700 other jobs disappear.

You multiply that times millions, it’s not hard to see why we’re in the situation we’re in. Look at Flint, Michigan. Look at Ohio. Look at Wisconsin; look at Pennsylvania. Look all over the Midwest and really all over the country: all those industries have just vanished, and not because it’s better for working people. The argument for NAFTA back then was all these Nobel laureate economists and former presidents saying, “It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna create 400,000 jobs in America in the first year. It’s gonna raise the standard of living for Mexican workers and American workers.” Everything that played out is exactly the opposite.

It’s what Ross Perot said in the debate between Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Perot back in 1992, when he said, “We’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of all of our jobs going south.” It’s exactly what happened. We’ve seen that the standard of living for Mexican workers has been cut in half since NAFTA went into effect, and also the standard of living for American workers has been reduced.

In this past election, we talked about the swing states; the core of the swing states that were going to deliver the election was Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. You look at how all those states went, and there’s a reason why. In my first twenty-eight years as a UAW member, working at Chrysler, all I saw was plants closed year after year, and I feel a rage to this day about how we’ve been cheated. So when you see a person like Donald Trump come along and start talking about tariffs and trade, and people still are [being threatened with] their plants being closed, that spoke to people.

Prior to NAFTA, we had tariffs in place in a lot of these sectors. But it wasn’t just a carpet bombing of tariffs, where they just put a tariff on everything everywhere. They were strategically put in place to to encourage people buying our products. And they worked somewhat reciprocally between countries, but at the end of the day, there were a lot of tariffs in place in auto and different industries. NAFTA eliminated all those tariffs [that we] had in place for decades.

Wall Street is a driver behind a lot of this fear that’s being put out about tariffs. The people who benefited over the last thirty years from these broken trade deals have been the corporate class and the wealthy. Because as they drove a race to the bottom by shifting all of our manufacturing to low-wage countries and drove their profits up, they didn’t pass those profits on to the consumer. They didn’t pass those profits on to the workers; they didn’t pass those profits on to the communities where these companies reside. The profits all [went into] stock buybacks and increased CEO pay and dividends and all that.

The last fifteen years, we’ve seen record profits in the auto industry: I believe it’s $1.6 trillion in profit for the top ten automakers in the last fifteen years. Instead of investing back in the communities where they reside, instead of investing in the workers who generate those profits, instead of paying more in taxes — or companies that have been given a lot of government assistance [paying that money back] — they’ve put $367 billion in stock dividends and buybacks and over a billion dollars in CEO pay.

That’s the problem here. So when we talk about how tariffs are going to drive the cost of things up, they don’t have to; it’s a choice. Going back to roughly 2019 or 2020, over a four-year period, automotive companies took advantage of the pandemic — and anytime there’s a crisis in this country, the corporate class and the wealthy find ways to extract more wealth for themselves — the price of automobiles over those four years went up 35–40 percent on average. There was no reason for it. They came up with the excuse that they needed parts and things like that. That wasn’t the issue. Wages didn’t go up; nothing changed for workers. They didn’t invest more in our communities. [The automakers] saw an opportunity to jack prices up, to price gouge the consumer and make more profits.

As proof of that, Stellantis alone got really aggressive with its pricing. The sticker on a Ram truck that I leased in 2020 was $62,000, which is a lot of money. In 2023 when my lease was up, that same truck was $82,000. It went up $20,000 over a three-year period, and nothing really happened. They don’t have to raise the price of anything. It’s a choice.

Now that the stock market’s been impacted somewhat by all this doomsday-scenario [talk], you hear Wall Street crying and leading the battle cry that [tariffs are] going to drive prices up and it’s the end of the world. This is one thing that I do know. For workers who have 401(k)s, such as myself, yeah, there’s concern. But ultimately, you know whose 401(k)s have been suffering for the last thirty-five years? The millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the offshoring of this factory work.

First, I don’t find it coincidental that as Trump was announcing the tariff, Stellantis was announcing a layoff. Things didn’t change that quickly; the tariffs weren’t even in place yet. I think it was intentional. Rather than Stellantis being proactive, knowing full well for three months now that tariffs were coming . . . it had been warned. It could have been more like GM and Ford, who were looking at ways to adapt to this. GM announced it is increasing product at the Fort Wayne assembly plant for trucks. They’re not talking about that. They’re not talking about Ford coming up with employee pricing for everyone.

Ford and GM chose to get creative, and they’re looking at ways to bring work back and to work with the consumer. Meanwhile Stellantis shows the same old tired philosophy of making workers pay for its bad decisions. So I do believe that Stellantis will bring work back. I do believe these tariffs will result in auto work coming back to this country. Free traders are using that layoff as their battle cry to say, “See, we told you.” But they’re not saying, “Wait a minute, what about the GM plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana that just announced it’s going to bring back more product?” They’re not talking about that.

I think a majority of our members understand. They’ve lived it. You can talk to many of our members, and many of their lives have been disrupted. They’ve had to pack up their families and move more than one time, because a plant closed in in Missouri and they moved to Ohio, and then their plant in Ohio closed — now they’re in Indiana. People have already experienced the broken trade system in this country more than once, and they’re fed up with it. So a lot of them understand it.

I think a lot of them believe that tariffs aren’t the end-all, be-all solution to this. Tariffs are a tool. They’re a mechanism to force these companies to start doing the right thing and looking at American workers and looking at American jobs, which have been left behind for three decades now. So a lot of workers support that.

Now, when you talk about blanket tariffs on everything — I can’t go in depth enough on breaking down every tariff in place and every product. There’s concern, because the corporate world is being very apparent that their reaction is just going to be to jack prices up and find another way to price gouge consumer. But that doesn’t have to happen. So people are concerned about the price of things going up. But ultimately, the price of things doesn’t matter when you don’t have a job.

My first question would be, where are all the jobs in this advanced sector? I’m not seeing them.

I graduated high school in 1987. When I was in high school, all we were told was, college was the path to the future — you’ve got to get a college degree. I went to trade school. I became an electrician. I’ve got a lot of friends who went to college and got master’s degrees and everything. And I see a lot of people nowadays going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for an education, and they can’t find a job where they can live. So where are the jobs?

That’s a fallacy to say that we have transformed out of a manufacturing [economy]. The manufacturing sector has been a lifeblood. It’s what built what we used to call “the middle class” in this country. I don’t believe in the middle class; I just believe there’s a working class and there are the rich — and if you’re not an owner and you don’t own the business and you don’t make all the decisions and you don’t have massive wealth, then you’re a working-class person.

We hear this debate about national security, and this administration is using fentanyl production and border security as an issue. I don’t believe those are really issues with national security. But I do believe, when we eliminate our manufacturing base in this country, we’re going to be in big trouble if we have to defend ourselves. Because when you can’t produce anything, you’re opening yourself up for attack from anyone. I go back to the arsenal of democracy in World War II: the way that World War II was won when the United States got involved was, we utilized the excess capacity at our auto plants in this country to build bombers, to build tanks, to build jeeps.

So our manufacturing base is key to national security — and to good-paying union jobs. Prior to NAFTA’s inception in 1994, just over 20 percent of the workforce was union. Less than 10 percent is union now. So it hasn’t just been an attack on manufacturing; it’s been an attack on good-paying jobs that have pensions, that have benefits, that have high wages, that people can live a decent life off of.

Manufacturing has always provided that. A lot of people that go into these information-type jobs . . . what kind of money are they making? What kind of benefits are they getting? We have to ask those questions.

I think [with] a lot of polling, you have to take into account the politics of it. During the election, a majority of our members supported, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but over 40 percent supported Trump. A lot of our members, when we would do polling over other issues — plant issues or working issues — they were polling along the same lines, just because they were pissed about us not endorsing Trump. They were saying they disagreed with our stance on, you know, wanting to take action at this plant.

I think politics feeds into it, and you’ve got to think about what’s going on right now. While we are applauding the tariffs for auto, you look at the [other] things that this administration is doing — ripping up the contracts of 700,000 federal workers. You look at the attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education. You look at the threats to Social Security with Elon Musk being involved in all this. Part of that [polling] could be impacted by those things that are going on right now, because people are seeing a negative impact out the gate on other things that are affecting them.

But at the end of the day, I look at it this way: Nothing has impacted working-class Americans in this country more in the last thirty-plus years than our broken trade system, and nothing has been done to address that in the last thirtysome years. So it’s not that we applaud everything that this administration is doing, but it’s the first administration in my working life that’s tried to do something to address this broken trade system.

I believe Trump put tariffs on China in his first presidency, and I know the Biden administration continued those tariffs. But when it came to the electric vehicle (EV) transition, the Biden administration put a 100 percent tariff on China due to national security issues and theft of information, things like that. We applauded that when it happened. But the problem with those tariffs was that — and the Biden administration doesn’t get enough credit for this, with the transition to battery EVs — a lot of factories were being built, a lot of work was being put in place. . . . A lot of that is still in process right now. So I don’t think we fully recognize the benefit of that and won’t for a couple years.

That’s when you hear this argument now from the people that are crying a lot about the tariffs, who are saying, “It takes two to three years to build a new plant.” What they’re not talking about is the excess capacity we have in this country right now when it comes to our auto industry. Take Stellantis alone: the Toledo Jeep South plant — it could put new product in there. Take Warren Truck right here in Michigan, where I am right now, where they made Ram trucks for eight years. It quit making them there a year ago and shifted that work to Mexico. It could put that work back in that plant tomorrow, where 3,000 people are laid off right now.

We project, just looking at the Big Three alone, they could bring back 50,000 jobs using the excess capacity they have in their plants in very short order. It doesn’t take two to three years to retool and adjust what you already have. You can just throttle up.

Yes, the Biden administration did strategically use tariffs. But we asked it to put auto tariffs on the companies that exist now to try to stop the bleeding of the millions of jobs that have been leaving in the last thirty years. And [the administration wasn’t] willing to go that far.

We’ve said from day one in politics, we’re going to call balls and strikes, and no matter what party it is, when you take an issue like trade — which is the biggest issue that has impacted working-class Americans in this country, in my thirty-six years as a worker — it’s a big deal for someone to to go this hard on tariffs. And like I said, we agree with strategically doing tariffs, in the right areas and the right industries, and not punishing everyone. Canada pays decent wages; they have good standards; they have good health care. They’re not the enemy in this.

Even our neighbors in Mexico — the workers aren’t the enemy here. The workers are the victims, because the standard of living was supposed to come up for these workers, and just the opposite happened. They don’t have insurance, they don’t have retirement security, and their wages have went down with the inception of NAFTA. So I don’t blame the workers. I blame corporate greed, and that’s where the focus of this has to be. We have to have standards in our trade policies, that if we’re going to do business with someone, they need to lift up the standard of [living of] working people. And if the workers get left behind in that equation, then we shouldn’t be doing business with them.

When you talk about the labor movement and unions . . . for the UAW, complacency has ruled the day for the last several decades. And a lot of the labor movement has been asleep at the wheel while things have been happening. We’ve not been fighting the fights we should be fighting.

So when I came in as president with our new International Executive Board, we pledged that we’re putting members first. We’re getting back to our roots, and we’re going to fight like hell. In my first month of being president of the UAW, I remember getting a call from the AFL-CIO, and it said, “President Biden’s going to make his announcement for reelection, and we’re going to try to get all the principal unions to come in and announce their endorsement as he makes the announcement.” I said, “I can’t do that. There’s a lot of work that’s got to be done right now, and we’re going to make sure that we’re on the right side of this, and we have expectations. We’re not going to freely give our endorsement to somebody.”

A big problem in this fight all along has been, the Democratic Party has come to take labor for granted when it comes to elections. And it was always this mantra, “What are you going to do, vote Republican? They don’t support unions.” I go back to these Midwest states that are always the swing states: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. You look at what’s happened in those states over the last three decades, and they’ve seen their futures disappear. All we’ve been told by the other side and by the Democrats mostly is, “It’s okay.” No one’s been leading that fight.

There have been some really good, strong Democrats that have stood with us in those fights. But there’s a huge faction in the Democratic Party that, under the Clinton administration and since, became basically corporate Democrats. They’re taking money from the wealthy — the same people that fund both [Democratic and Republican] campaigns hedge their bets. Working-class people have been left behind, and working-class people are tired of being told that the Democrats have your back when, when we go to fight these fights, they haven’t.

We’ve been very clear over and over since I’ve been president, with everyone in Congress who we talked to, Democrat or Republican. This is our expectation. Our mission is not going to change no matter who’s in the White House or who’s in Congress. We expect you to go to bat on these issues, and if you don’t, we’re not going to be there for you no matter what party you are. If you support these issues, if you stand up for workers and a better life for working-class people, we’ll be there no matter what party you are. I believe the Democrats came to take us for granted, and those days are over in the UAW.

They’re justifiably worried. Everyone is, because there’s uncertainty, and the reason we have this uncertainty is because our manufacturing base in this country has disappeared. It’s been ripped out from under us for thirty-plus years, so we have to change that. There may be some short-term pain in this, but we have to get this right. 

We have a chance now to redefine what trade looks like in this country — the thing that’s had the biggest impact on all of our 401(k)s, on all of our pension plans — and we have to get it right. Again I’m not saying that this administration has all the right solutions to this, because what has to happen as we bring these jobs back . . . they also have to be good-paying jobs with adequate health care, with retirement security — with people not having to work two and three jobs or work seven days a week just to live paycheck to paycheck. We have to have a social policy. 

When it comes to the stocks and 401(k)s: yes, there’s going to be some temporary pain involved in this transition right now. But I do believe we have to look at the long term, and long term, we have to bring back the manufacturing base in this country. I go back to what I said earlier. When every 100 manufacturing jobs creates 700 secondary jobs that support all that, that’s how you generate wealth, that’s how you generate income, that’s how you generate security for a good future and for a decent retirement. Without those things, we’re going to see more of the same. And right now, 60 percent of Americans have no retirement savings, so I don’t know what the hell they’re going to do when they retire.

I know what risk there is in doing nothing, because we’ve seen it play out for thirty to thirty-five years. Doing nothing has basically driven our economy and our working class’s ability to have a decent life off a cliff.

There are risks with anything that we do. But when I say we have to get it right, this isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s going to take time. There are elections coming up in 2026, so we have to put the things out there that are important. We have to push for the things that matter, like decent wages and having standards involved in bringing this work back where people can have a decent quality of life. And the politicians that support those things we go to war for, and the ones that don’t we go to war against. All those things are going to play into this.

We’ll see the impact when companies are bringing jobs back, if they choose to utilize excess capacity and act now and really change things for the good. If they’re going to cry, “We’ve got to build new plans. It’s going to take too long,” then it’s going to be a struggle. But we’ve seen time and time again, tariffs have been used in this country: back in the 1960s with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s chicken tax, prior to NAFTA in the ’80s and ’90s with the auto industry, and they’ve been successful.

So tariffs do work, but again, it’s about how we implement them and how we go about ensuring that they’re used in the right way. It’s not perfect what’s happening right now, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we’ve seen in the past thirtysome years.