A Trump Tariff Case Study: Can the U.S. Again Be the Power Tool King?
While the company does some domestic manufacturing, its power tools—drills, saws, routers, and the like—are all made abroad. The same is true of most of the power tool brands you'll find at your local Home Depot or Lowe's; many started as American companies but are now part of multinational corporations that do little manufacturing in the United States. Your Milwaukee reciprocating saw and Ryobi sander may sound like they come from the U.S. and Japan, but both companies are owned by Techtronic Industries, which is headquartered in Hong Kong. Your dad called his circular saw a 'skilsaw,' but Skil is now owned by Chervon, a Chinese company.
This is just the kind of industrial production President Trump would love to bring back to the U.S., and that, he assures us, tariffs will produce. It's part of a vision for what the American economy should be, where we make stuff again, a world-leading industrial machine humming with capability and power.
That goal is shared across the political spectrum; you'd be hard-pressed to find a politician of either party who would say we shouldn't make more things in America. Unfortunately, there are serious impediments to achieving reindustrialization on a large scale, and Trump's policies are just about the worst way to go about it. The woodworking tool industry—what it is today and how it has changed in recent decades—offers a revealing window into the obstacles this effort will face.
As a hobbyist woodworker for the last 20 years, I've accumulated a lot of tools. If you asked how many I have, I'd echo the quip gun owners often say: more than I need, but not as many as I want. A tour through my shop goes around the world—a couple of Japanese handsaws, a chisel set from the Czech Republic, a sander made by a German company but built in Malaysia, a table saw blade from Italy.
The big machines—the table saw, jointer, and planer (the latter two are used for flattening and truing boards)—have American brand names but were built in Taiwan, which for years has been the place toolmakers go to find the skilled but relatively inexpensive labor that allows them to produce tools at lower cost than they can domestically. And lots of knickknacks from China.
When I started woodworking 25 years ago, Chinese tools were mostly junk. That's no longer true; as in so many industries, the quality of Chinese manufacturing has rapidly improved, to the point where some of what is produced there is on par in quality with what is made in Europe or the U.S.—if those products are made in the U.S. at all.
So what woodworking tools are still made here? The big companies may make some accessories here, but for the most part, the industry is confined to small manufacturers of relatively high-priced, niche products that don't even try to compete on price.
For instance, I own a nice hand plane made by WoodRiver, the house brand of the retail chain Woodcraft; right now it sells for around $175. It was made in China, but it's solid quality, unlike some Chinese planes you can get on Amazon for 50 bucks. If you want to buy a similar American plane, you can get one from Lie-Nielsen, which does its manufacturing in Maine. It will cost you $385. I like my plane, but I'm told that using a Lie-Nielsen plane is almost a religious experience.
When I told Deneb Puchalski of Lie-Nielsen about my plane, he scoffed. 'You know what that WoodRiver is? That is a direct copy of a Lie-Nielsen plane,' but made in China with cheaper labor and less exacting standards.
There are other manufacturers that have carved out a similar space in the market. Woodpeckers, which manufactures in Ohio, makes measuring and marking tools, along with a variety of jigs and fixtures. It is considered the gold standard of quality; if you need a combination square that's accurate to 0.001 inches and has a host of innovative features, that's the brand you'd choose. It will also cost you $179.99.
The last combination square I bought was made by Irwin Tools, which has been bought and sold many times since it was founded in 1885. Today, Irwin is another subsidiary of Stanley Black & Decker. My basic Irwin square, which was made in China, cost me $15. It may not spark joy, but it works fine.Through the major spending bills Joe Biden signed—the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law—his administration fashioned an industrial policy built on manufacturing, centered on both critical technologies such as semiconductors and 'place-based' interventions targeting struggling areas to create high-tech centers that could spur an area-wide revival. It may be some time before we know just how successful that strategy was (and it may depend on how much of it Trump decides to dismantle). But it was focused and limited. If we decided that we wanted to reshore production of a wider variety of goods—including something like power tools—could we do it?
The answer is a qualified yes: We could, but it would have to be done methodically, and it would take a long time—years or even decades.
The Chinese manufacturing system that today seems so powerful developed over an extended period, through a combination of determination, substantial government support, and an almost limitless supply of inexpensive labor. A retired manufacturing engineer told me that when his company began moving production to China two decades ago, they encountered a mirror image of their domestic challenges: When they needed to make an alteration to their domestic U.S. production, the key question was whether more labor would be involved; material costs were trivial in comparison. Their Chinese partners were only concerned about material costs and dismissed any concerns about labor; they could always hire plenty of workers for very little.
Over time, China developed integrated manufacturing hubs that enable quick production of things like power tools: a company that makes motors, another company that makes injection molds, another that makes springs and screws, all working together and ready to contract with large corporations to produce their products. We still have that kind of integrated system in some sectors like autos, but much of it has departed.
As for woodworking equipment, 'very little of it is made in the United States anymore, because the companies that made that stuff took their manufacturing overseas so they didn't have to pay American wages,' says Puchalski.
We could rebuild those manufacturing ecosystems in the U.S., but we can't just wish it into existence. 'It took time to send all this stuff over to China, and it's going to take time to retrieve it all,' says economist Susan Helper of Case Western University, who served in senior roles in the Obama and Biden administrations, including managing industrial strategy.
Tariffs can play a role in that process, but they would have to be carefully designed and predictable enough to allow businesses to do long-term planning. They would have to remain in place to give the domestic industry time to develop, and account for the fact that even American manufacturers often need to import materials from overseas. Lie-Nielsen, for instance, gets iron ore from Canada. 'Sourcing material is always an issue, particularly with the political environment today. That could become crippling' if tariffs go too high, Puchalski says. 'Companies like ours that are relatively small are going to be hit the hardest.'
Since foreign labor will be cheaper than American labor for the foreseeable future, any domestic manufacturer that wants to be competitive on price will have to get more out of each worker, which means automation. And that means creating fewer jobs than we might like.
The Trump administration has circled around that problem. 'President Trump is interested in the jobs of the future, not the jobs of the past,' said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently. 'We don't need to necessarily have a booming textile industry like where I grew up again, but we do want to have precision manufacturing and bring that back.' Precision manufacturing can offer good jobs, but not as many.
In fact, this entire debate seems animated by a vision of a bygone time. 'Manufacturing jobs in the past have been good jobs,' says Susan Helper. 'I think that's less to do with something inherent in the nature of manufacturing and more to do with the time period in which the U.S. became a manufacturing power, which was also one in which unions were able to organize.' That ensured good wages and benefits. But the 'manufacturing wage premium'—the degree to which factory workers make higher wages than similar workers in other kinds of jobs—'has eroded quite significantly.' Not only that, she adds, 'it was never true that all manufacturing jobs were good jobs. Some of them were pretty terrible.' Just ask the women of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Without unions, working in a factory isn't necessarily better than working in a Walmart or a Starbucks. And if we aren't talking about vital national security interests (relevant in the case of, say, semiconductors), there may be a limit to how much we want to invest in bringing production of goods like power tools back to the U.S., especially if it means drastically higher prices in the short run.
Businesses will respond rationally to the incentives they have. Executives at Stanley Black & Decker said on their latest earnings call that they are migrating some of their manufacturing—the products destined for the U.S.—away from China to mitigate the risks associated with ongoing trade tensions. They didn't say where they were migrating it to, but Mexico—where my drills were made—is a good bet.
At the end of our conversation, I told Puchalski that I've always wanted a Lie-Nielsen plane, but the purchase has been stuck in the 'someday' category. 'Someday could be tomorrow,' he said, assuring me that once I got one of their gorgeous American-made tools, I'd never go back. I'm sure he's right, but I haven't been able to bring myself to spend the money just yet.
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