Tariffs are fuelling demand for US manufacturing

Jack Schron, president of Jergens, is a US manufacturer in the rust belt state of Ohio who has experienced a surge in orders and employed new workers amid Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff regime.

Jack Schron at the Jergens factory in Cleveland, Ohio. Picture: Roger Mastroianni

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Jack Schron believes America is on the verge of a “quantum leap” in manufacturing that will have businesses reshoring in the US, creating jobs and becoming more productive.

Tariffs are a key instrument making it happen – but not the only one, he said.

The president and chief executive of Jergens, a US-based manufacturing company specialising in precision tools, lifting equipment and fasteners, said there had been a major philosophical shift taking place regarding the role of US manufacturing.

“It might not be fair to say it’s all tariff driven,” Mr Schron said. “It might be attitudinal. Because we have, for the last 35 to 40 years, as a country, we have attitudinally said, ‘Oh man, we’re going to be a service sector economy … We’re not going to make stuff’.

“Now the word we’re using is reshoring. We want to bring back the manufacturing to the United States shores that we’d given away.”

Speaking from inside his 130,000 square foot (12,077sq m) facility in Cleveland, Mr Schron said that US President Donald Trump’s plan to remove taxes on overtime could also be “game changing for the United States”.

The plan had gone under the radar because attention had instead been focused on the pledge for no taxes on tips in the hospitality sector. But Mr Schron said the implications for US manufacturers were “huge”.

“What does that mean to a manufacturing company? That means that if we ask our workforce, ‘would you like to work two hours more a day?’ That means on a 40-hour week, they’re now working 50 hours – that’s a 25 per cent increase in productivity and performance,” he said.

“What does that mean to the individual … That means that they’re probably eligible to go buy a boat, take a vacation with their family, all kinds of things, because it’s not going to be taxed.”

Acknowledging there were good and bad elements to tariffs, Mr Schron made clear that he was one of the US-based manufacturers with a positive story to tell about the impact of the new administration’s sweeping tariff regime.

Mr Schron said they were helping to price his products – produced across two facilities in Chicago and Cleveland – more competitively against low-cost rivals, including those in China and Southeast Asia.

Mr Schron at the Jergens factory. Picture: Roger Mastroianni

“And so our business is just booming,” he said.

“We’ve seen an increase in our business, both here in Cleveland and Chicago. Chicago alone, we put on over 25 new employees just in the last six, eight months,” he said. “We’ve seen a pick-up of probably 10 to 15 per cent in our demand.”

Jergens was founded in 1942, during World War II, by Mr Schron’s father and grandfather, when the company was “making stuff to support the war effort”.

The 77-year-old has been the president of Jergens for 38 years, and also served as a Republican member on the Cuyahoga County Council in Ohio – a key manufacturing state – from 2011–2024.

One of the purposes of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs is to revive US manufacturing and oversee a reindustrialisation of America.

Mr Schron believes this vision is edging closer to reality. He said business owners could not assume the tariffs were permanent, so it was “our job to become competitive, to reduce our costs, to make our products more efficiently”.

“We’ve got a window of time right now, I believe, in these next two years, to get it right,” he said. “I think we’re actually going to be making a quantum change in the United States – that manufacturing is going to return.”

Ethan Karp, chief executive of the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network in Northeast Ohio, known as MAGNET, told The Australian there were about 280,000 people who lived in legacy Ohio cities and worked in manufacturing.

MAGNET – a non-profit organisation that had hosted big political names, including Barack Obama and JD Vance over the years, aims to help thousands of small and medium-sized manufacturers in Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown and Canton to innovate and find the people and workers they needed to succeed.

Dr Karp said manufacturing remained the “backbone of northeast Ohio,” and, depending on the county, it made up 15 to 17 per cent of total jobs, while still “actually driving half of the economy”.

“Over the last couple years, we’ve been able to put 3000 net new people into manufacturing who would have never been able to,” he said.

Pressed on tariffs, Dr Karp said it was unclear what impact they were having at this stage, but there were different stories emerging.

“Here’s what we do know, what we do know is that there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. You have a tariff today, gone tomorrow. Increase today, decrease tomorrow,” he said.

“In trade wars, there are casualties, so there is a segment of the manufacturers who are those casualties, right? Their products, their base products, are going up. They’re having to pass those prices on – which they’re all doing, if they can. Eventually that will hit consumers. It hasn’t really hit consumers yet. That’s when I think you’re gonna see really interesting changes.”

However, Dr Karp said other manufacturers were “already benefiting” from the tariff changes.

“We have folks that have been on the receiving end of big corporations saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to look for a local supplier’ … and they have gotten more contracts, and they have grown their business,” he said.

“So there is a category of people that are very happy … There’s a category that are very unhappy.”

He warned that the industrial policy needed to facilitate the revival of US manufacturing and ensure American economic security did “not happen overnight just because you increase the tariffs”.

“The timeline of what needs to happen in America for the manufacturing to come back is on the span of a decade, not in the next two or three years,” Dr Karp said.