Stellantis has paused production at two assembly plants in Canada and Mexico in response to tariffs, leaving thousands of Americans and Canadians out of their jobs while the company figures out what to do next. The idled plants produce both the Dodge Charger Daytona EV and Jeep Wagoneer S EV, among other vehicles.
In the aftermath of yesterday’s Inflation Day announcements by Mr. Trump, the fallout has been swift – and perhaps swifter than expected.
To set the stage for this article: tariffs do not work. There are some potential benefits or situations that they can be used in, but when they are decided on haphazardly, not targeted towards any particular industry or country, not accompanied by onshoring incentives, and not done in concert with allies to produce a desired effect, they tend to just be bad for the country imposing them.
Instead, what they do – particularly when implemented in the idiotic way that these have been announced – is push ally countries away, encourage countries to find other global consumers for their exports, induce retaliation, and cause inflation for the country imposing them.
That last inflation point is especially direct and easy to understand, so lets explain how it works.
Imagine that you are one of two companies making a product, which you can sell profitably for $11, but your overseas competitor can sell for $10. Then, your country adds a 50% tariff to your competitor in order to make your product more competitive. Now, your competitor sells their product for $15 – but you’re a business, and your interest is in making money, and you now know that nobody can compete with your $11 price… or $12, $13, or even $14 for that matter.
So you set your price to $14.50, still undercutting your competition, making yourself more profit, and causing 45% inflation for everyone who had previously bought your competitor’s $10 product.
In this way, tariffs are a direct shock to prices for consumers. And when those tariffs are broad across all industries, they mean that consumers will pay more for everything.
This is just an extremely simplified example of only one way in which tariffs negatively affect consumers in the country implementing them, but it is widely held by anyone who studies economics that tariffs are generally harmful.
It is possible for tariffs to reduce offshoring of jobs, or at least, those who believe in their use tend to consider this as their primary purpose. This is why labor unions generally support protectionist policy, as they generally consider that free trade agreements have resulted in offshoring of jobs from advanced economies, and therefore a lowering of overall global labor standards as companies flee countries with higher wage or labor standards.
But we’ve seen attempts at protectionist tariffs in the auto industry fail before when we tried to implement tariffs on Japanese steel and autos in the 1970s, and all it did was give 50 years of global export dominance to the Japanese (as I went over in this article, or you can read about in this union publication).
More proximately, the last round of tariffs implemented by the exact same person who has somehow been allowed to wander into the White House for a second time (despite there being a clear Constitutional remedy for this crisis) were shown to harm the US economy. Mr. Trump’s tariffs didn’t lead to an increase in American jobs in targeted industries, and retaliatory tariffs led to great harm for American industry, especially farmers, due to targeted retaliatory tariffs by China.
But now, not content to just harm the economy and instead apparently wanting to destroy it wholesale, Mr. Trump’s new tariff announcement yesterday is much broader than his comparatively small-scale tariffs of yesteryear. The previous salvo just managed to shatter the US soybean industry, whereas this one stands to harm all US industries and consumers.
And today we’re already seeing the first effect: job losses in American manufacturing, the very sector that Mr. Trump’s lies claim he’s trying to save.
Stellantis announced today that it will idle some plants in Canada and Mexico, leading to job losses for Americans. It directly implicated the tariffs as its reason for these plant idlings.
Those job losses total 4,500 for our erstwhile Canadian allies, and 900 for workers in the US in associated plants. A Mexican plant will be idled, but due to the strength of the Mexican workers’ union agreement, Mexican auto workers will still report to work and be paid while the plant is idle.
The plants chosen for idling produce several vehicles, including the Dodge Charger Daytona EV and Jeep Wagoneer S EV, but also the Chrysler Pacifica and Jeep Compass. They are supported by US plants that provide parts for those vehicles.
US workers at stamping plants in Michigan and transmission and casting plants in Indiana will be the ones to lose their jobs during the pause.
Stellantis said that it is still figuring out what the long-term effects of the tariffs will be, but that these immediate actions are a direct response to the tariffs while they figure things out. It will continue to determine if further action is necessary.
An email sent by North American COO Antonio FIlosa said “We understand the current environment creates uncertainty. Be assured that we are very engaged with all of our key stakeholders, including top government leaders, unions, suppliers and dealers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, as we work to manage and adapt to these changes.”
Uncertainty is something that all businesses, but especially the auto business, abhors. Automotive manufacturing is a complex process requiring coordination of suppliers across thousands of parts produced across many countries.
Cars are planned and produced on long timelines, with lead times of some ~7 years on average from concept to production. As a result, tariff policy that changes day by day can make it difficult for any complex manufacturing, especially automotive, to plan around.
In those situations, sometimes a manufacturer will just throw their hands up and say “we give up, we’ll find someone else to sell to instead.”
And it looks like today’s move by Stellantis is just the first company to do that. Expect more.
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