Shawn Fain is Tragically Mistaken: Tariffs Are Not Good for the Working Class

Originally published on CounterPunch April 24, 2025

Kshama Sawant

Trump’s sweeping tariffs have been opposed by much of the ruling class because they correctly recognize them as a recipe for recession and economic chaos in their system.

As a result of opposition from the capitalist class, featuring a deep crisis in the stock market and ominous signs from the U.S. Treasury market, Trump has twice been forced to substantially walk back his tariffs, such as on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. 

The ruling class and their mouthpieces like the Wall Street Journal did not revolt because they’re opposed to tariffs in general. In fact, they are favorable toward increasing tariffs on China, which are now at an average of 124 percent, even if they may be concerned about Trump’s dramatic escalation. And they’re certainly not opposing Trump’s tariffs on behalf of working people. 

At the same time, tariffs are not a solution for the international working class any more than free trade and neoliberal globalization have been. Depending on the period and the crisis of capitalism, free trade or protectionism are simply tools for the capitalist class to extract maximum profits through a divide-and-conquer strategy, pitting workers in one nation against workers in another. Labor or left leaders who believe the best the working class can do is choose between one exploitation scheme or another by the bosses will send us down a disastrous path, as the global capitalist class gears up for trade and military wars between the U.S.- and China-led blocs, the brunt of which will be thrust upon working people in every nation. Yet, shockingly, this is exactly what’s happening. 

Trump’s tariffs have been publicly embraced by two of the labor movement’s most prominent leaders — Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien, Presidents of the United Auto Workers (UAW) International and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, respectively. 

Despite his murmurings of scepticism about Trumpian mayhem, Fain has effectively appointed himself chief labor cheerleader for Trump’s tariffs, declaring even before Trump’s inauguration that “we need a strong system of tariffs that serve the national and working-class interest.” 

Meanwhile, Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of left publication Jacobin and current President of the left-liberal magazine The Nation, has lavished praise on Fain’s position on tariffs, calling Fain the labor movement’s “greatest voice.” Speaking from both sides of his mouth, Sunkara warns that “we shouldn’t really have a stake in capitalist industrial policy,” a warning rendered meaningless not only by his fulsome support of Fain, but also his position that “strategic tariffs can provide some relief from social dumping and help auto sectors.” 

These positions represent a dangerous inability to understand the fundamental nature of the capitalist system and the real impacts of tariffs on already struggling working people. 

The working class needs leadership that is clear-eyed about capitalism, the need for working-class internationalism, and why we should never seek to build alliances with the bosses anywhere.

We need leadership capable of organizing an international militant fightback for living wages, unionization, safe working conditions everywhere, and an end to war and the climate crisis. We urgently need strike action to fight against Trump’s attacks on public-sector unions, mass deportations and abductions of campus antiwar activists, and against the brutal budget cuts by both Trump and by state and local Democrats. Fain and the UAW leadership have a particular role to play in campus strikes against Trump’s assault on the antiwar movement, on democratic rights, and the abductions of immigrant activists. The labor movement’s membership and resources should also be harnessed to build fighting campaigns to go on the offensive to win gains like Medicare for All by taxing the rich. The leadership of the Teamsters and the national labor movement should be organizing simultaneous union drives at dozens, and even hundreds of, Amazon warehouses in order to beat the company’s savage union busting. Coordinated strikes to shut down Amazon warehouses across the nation will be needed. 

All of this is urgently needed, and instead, much of the labor leadership is making its peace with Trump and welcoming his tariffs.

Tariffs and Recessions

Trump was forced to declare a 90-day pause on big parts of his plan after the stock market debacle, but a lot of damage has already been done to working people, including to their 401(k) retirement plans and the continuing spikes in the cost of living. It has also had wider consequences for the bosses’ system — to business planning, consumer confidence, the U.S. state’s standing among its allies, and the decades-long reputation of the U.S. as a stable anchor for the world economy. Had Trump not reversed course, a recession in the near term was very likely (and it is still likely not far delayed).

Fain’s argument for tariffs includes the idea that stock market slumps are exclusively rich people’s problems. He said that the majority of working people “have no retirement savings, so when I hear all the crying about the stock market, this is just Wall Street.” Fain has likewise dismissed the fears of a tariff-fueled recession as a billionaire concern. 

This is absurd on its face — working people will absolutely pay a high price for the recession. The ruling class always seeks to offload the costs of their system’s crises onto us, and this one will be no exception. Fain has also apparently forgotten about the tens of millions of workers and retirees, including current and retired UAW members, who have 401(k) pensions that depend on the stock market. Most workers who have access to pensions today have 401(k) accounts, after union leaders of the last several decades presided over the destruction of defined benefit pensions because of their unwillingness to fight — pensions previously won through historic militant labor struggles. 

Tariffs and Manufacturing Jobs: There Are No Shortcuts

Trump has claimed: “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” This is nonsense.

As basically every credible analyst has said, tariffs will not be effective for the creation of manufacturing jobs.

First, the supply chains of component parts like screws, nuts, and bolts are intricate, involved, and thoroughly global. Manufacturing the parts in America will pose major logistical complications for corporations, and come at an enormous cost in both time and money — a cost the bosses are loath to pay. A more fundamental problem is that U.S. manufacturing doesn’t have ready and cheap domestic supplies of basic materials and components. Most corporations would be all the more reluctant to risk the major investment required in the context of the severely unstable policy environment, not having much idea where the tariff policy is headed under Trump or what parts of it might be reversed after him. 

Even if the questions of component parts, raw materials, relocation costs, and policy stability were somehow magically resolved, the auto bosses will do everything in their power to avoid the labor costs they will need to pay in the United States. In order to offset the cost of tariffs, they would fight to make labor in neocolonial nations even cheaper than it is now, with systematic collaboration, and deadly force if needed, from the U.S. state. Additionally, they would endeavor to pass on the increased costs by raising prices as much as possible, which is another avenue of shifting the burden on to working people. This would mean increased exploitation of workers on both sides of the tariffs. 

The auto bosses would also be unlikely to set up shop in states where the UAW or unions generally are strong. They would not only wage a cut-throat war to keep those new jobs from being unionized, they would also maximize automation to keep the amount of labor they need to the minimum.

To examine if tariffs can create jobs in general, it’s useful to look at what happened as a result of tariffs from Trump’s first administration. Studies find that some jobs did get created in the specific industry covered by tariffs, such as steel and washing machines. It is estimated that several thousand jobs were created in the steel industry and about 1,800 at Whirlpool, Samsung, and LG factories in the U.S. 

However, the number of such tariff-created jobs was far outweighed by the estimated jobs lost due to the tariffs.

For example, the U.S. has fewer than 150,000 steelworkers, that is, workers directly involved in producing steel. Compare this to millions more jobs in industries that use steel as an input, with over two million of those jobs in steel-intensive industries. The steel tariffs ended up causing an overall decline of manufacturing employment in those industries that was an “order of magnitude” higher than the modest gain in steel jobs.

This net detrimental effect on jobs is due to tariffs on input goods making production more expensive and also because of the impact of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports. 

Then there’s the inflation that working people have collectively borne. The estimated cost surcharge paid by the American working class came to $817,000 and $900,000, respectively, for every tariff-generated job in the washing machine and steel industries.

The fallacy here is believing that there is a shortcut on the basis of nationalistic policies under capitalism, rather than militant fightback and solidarity by workers internationally. There is no such shortcut.

Tariffs and the Race to the Bottom

Fain claims that the “point of tariffs is to eliminate the race to the bottom where we’re exploiting people.” He could not be more wrong — tariffs are part of the policies of economic nationalism that accelerate the race to the bottom. 

The ruling class opposing Trump’s out-of-control tariffs does not imply the tariffs are good for the working class. And it also doesn’t mean that tariffs are purely a Trumpian project. Tariffs are an integral part of the U.S.-China trade war, which itself is central to the wider U.S.-China conflict. They are one part of an overall increase in economic nationalism and conflict, which began before Trump and will continue after.

The present crisis of capitalism, polarized in two blocs between the U.S. and China, inevitably leads the world’s powers towards increasingly fierce competition. This will include both economic and military conflict, as is on display in the bloodbath in Ukraine. In fact, the war in Ukraine is openly recognized by bourgeois analysts as a proxy war between the U.S.-led and China-Russia-led blocs. Just like it was with free trade and globalization, the push for tariffs is on behalf of the U.S. capitalist class — despite their protests when it goes too far too quickly — and is particularly geared towards punishing Chinese imperialism and the capitalist classes aligned with it. The Chinese state is doing the same, in reverse. Every capitalist state will viciously place the maximum burden of economic and military warfare on the working and poor people in those regions as the conflict plays out. 

None of this is good news for working people. Fain is actually playing right into the hands of a divide-and-conquer strategy by the capitalists, turning workers in one country against workers in another. The likely best outcome for such a misguided policy would be manufacturing jobs for some workers, only for them to be disproportionately outweighed by far bigger job losses for other workers and massive inflation for all of working people as direct effects of tariffs, with the added probability of a recession further undermining our living standards. Capitalists use recessions, and even the threat of one, to go on the offensive, cutting social programs and attacking unions. This is being carried out on an unprecedented scale, both by Trump and by the Democratic Party in states and cities around the country.

In the context of the ensuing crisis after Trump’s tariff announcement, Fain revised his statements and said he’s not sure about all the tariffs but favors those for the auto industry. This is shockingly out of touch with the overall impacts of tariffs on working people. It’s also eerily reminiscent of the rotten position taken by the leaders of the American Federation of Labor in the 1910s through early 1930s. Those leaders maintained a narrow focus on craft-specific organizing, aiding the bosses in their divide-and-conquer efforts by gatekeeping against industry-wide organizing. They rejected the militant methods and working-class solidarity required to build a fighting labor movement. 

For labor leaders like Fain and O’Brien to support tariffs is a failure to understand, or a refusal to acknowledge, the global nature of capitalism, the basics of international supply chains, and the fact that the bosses will always squeeze every last drop of blood from the working class for their profits.

NAFTA, Tariffs, and the Fatal Pitfalls of Nationalism

Fain has repeatedly talked about tariffs being needed to address the crimes of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) — that at least tariffs are a “tool in the tool box.”

Dustin Guastella, Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623, stands up for Fain’s support of the tariffs with similar arguments — that the havoc wreaked by NAFTA and the whole era of neoliberal globalization show the need for tariffs and protectionism. 

NAFTA, which was the bellwether for the era of free trade and globalization that took a wrecking ball to U.S. manufacturing jobs, was certainly a historic attack on the American working class. But both protectionism and free trade are anti-worker regimes put forward by the capitalist class to suit their needs at a given time.

Capitalism is a zero sum game on more than one level. The bosses get to accumulate profits and wealth only by stealing most of the fruits of working people’s labor, and workers can only win substantial improvements in their lives if they get organized to inflict defeats on the ruling class and seize back a small measure of the vast wealth robbed from them. And internationally as well as within a nation, the bosses aim to use protectionism just like they use free trade, globalization, or any of their policies: to divide up the spoils of our labor amongst themselves, while pitting working people against one another. If tariffs allow more U.S. jobs, it means job losses for workers in nations subject to the tariffs. Retaliatory tariffs will mean the opposite effects, and so on and so forth in an accelerating trade war. 

What differs between different policy regimes is how the spoils are divided up among the global capitalist class. What remains a constant is that billions of working people are ruthlessly exploited. 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were very clear about this over 150 years ago. In an 1845 letter to a publisher, Engels tells them they have misunderstood his and Marx’s position on protectionism and free trade. Engels says, “We have no intention of defending protective tariffs any more than free trade, but rather of criticising both systems from our own standpoint. Ours is the communist standpoint.” 

Before Trump was forced to hit pause on the most extreme “Liberation Day” tariffs, O’Brien cheered the 25 percent tariff on Mexican beer, saying that it ”will help the 80,000-plus brewery workers in the Teamsters in America almost immediately.” The Teamster leadership has further claimed this tariff will help set a “standard for dignified living that American workers deserve.” It’s difficult to decide what’s most disconcerting: O’Brien’s callousness towards Mexican workers or his breathless insularity of celebrating short-term gains for a tiny section of the workforce in return for increased hardship on tens of millions.

Both Fain and O’Brien head up unions that have “international” in their names, but their positions on this issue are making a mockery of international working-class solidarity. By enthusiastically supporting tariffs, they are effectively saying they don’t care about the harm caused to workers in other nations, in addition to totally failing to understand the effects these policies will have on American workers.

Labor leaders across the border are hardly doing any better. François Laporte, President of Teamsters Canada and Vice President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, opposes Trump’s tariffs based on the negative impact it would have on the Canadian working class. Rather horrifyingly, though, Laporte defines “the power of solidarity” as unions and corporations coming together for the purpose of “protecting” the Canadian “economy and defending our workers and our identity as a nation,” without a hint of working-class internationalism.

The bosses in every nation have a spin machine that uses the ideas of national pride and patriotism in order to mask the most important division under capitalism — class. 

That spin machine is in overdrive right now, though it is a perpetual one under capitalism. We need to be clear: as workers, no matter what country we reside in, our enemies are the rich, not other workers, regardless of where they reside.

Labor leadership aligning with the capitalist class in their own nations has frightening and bloody historical precedent. This is in part why I said at the launch of my organization, Workers Strike Back, that the labor movement needs a reckoning.

Reformism and Business Unionism Versus Marxism and Class-Struggle Unionism

The fatal mistake being made by the labor leadership is encapsulated in Guastella’s statement that there are only two avenues for working people in the debate on trade: “Wall Street or Trump.” 

This is a case of false choices. It’s not unlike the failed lesser evil argument that we must choose between the two capitalist parties, whether Democrats or Republicans, and that working people can have no independent alternative. It comes from the complete misunderstanding that capitalism is eternal, combined with a desire to not be in the crosshairs of the ruling class. It also reflects a lack of confidence in the working class to fight for a different kind of society. The exploited masses are told they have to settle for the seemingly least evil option on offer from the bosses at a given moment, even though the acceptance of that premise means worsening misery. These failed ideas are connected to what Marxists call reformism, which rejects the need for (or possibility of) systemic change and instead leads to one dead end after another. 

Every ruling class in human history has sought to convince the impoverished masses that the deeply unequal social system they dominated was the best and only system possible. But none of the earlier class societies was eternal — not feudalism, not slave societies, not the Roman Empire — and capitalism isn’t either. 

Capitalism is not only not immortal, it is rotten to the core, and if it is allowed to continue, it will destroy humanity and the planet. 

Reformism is the rejection of this basic understanding, and it has had devastating consequences for the international working class. We need a complete break with it. Its logic inevitably leads to the idea of making peace with the capitalist class and with their political spokespeople, regardless of the cost. Reformism is the conviction that the most that labor leadership can do is try to squeeze a few more nickels from the bosses for a section of the working class.

It doesn’t really matter what motivation Fain and other labor leaders have for taking this misguided position on tariffs. The damaging effects on working-class fightback will not be lessened by “good intentions” even if they exist. And unfortunately, theirs is not an outlier position. 

Reformism goes hand in hand with business unionism, which has engulfed the labor leadership. Business unionism bases itself on the idea of finding common ground with the bosses. Most business unionist leaders avoid strike action at all costs and put the emphasis on the “bargaining table.” 

In stark contrast, class-struggle unionism recognizes the always-existing class conflict between bosses and workers, the need for relentless, militant organizing, and the strike action as the sharpest weapon in the hands of workers.

Fain and his fellow UAW leaders did organize a crucial strike in 2023. Workers Strike Back strongly supported the strike, but we also pointed out the limitations of the leadership’s strategy. Their “stand up” strike strategy meant not shutting down all plants of the Big Three. Under Fain, only one plant each at Ford, Stellantis, and GM was struck for the first eight days, and none of those was any of the companies’ most profitable plants, like those that produce the Ford F-150, the Dodge RAM 1500, or the Chevy Silverado. This meant that the strike started out by posing a very limited threat to the bosses. 

Eventually, the UAW strike did grow to include more than 45,000 workers at nine Big Three assembly plants. On this basis, while still not as strong as it should have been, the strike won breakthrough victories, because it cost the automakers billions of dollars.

At the same time, the gains won fell far short of the monumental losses suffered by the workers during the preceding two decades from NAFTA and free trade policies and the lack of class-struggle unionism.  In the run-up to the 2023 strike, the UAW leadership promised to reverse the losses of past concessionary contracts. But as many workers pointed out, the top pay rate won was still less in terms of purchasing power than what it was in 2006.

Not only could past losses have been overturned on the basis of a class-struggle strategy, it would have helped launch a revival of militant ideas. The capitalist class has the resources to wait out even a long strike, particularly one with limited effects on their bottomline. Class-struggle unionism, which is rejected at present by the vast majority of labor leaders like Fain, is what will be needed to force historic concessions from the bosses, and for unionizing and winning historic contracts at Amazon. All-out strikes, especially at the most profitable locations, and a massive campaign of community rallies, solidarity strikes, and civil disobedience are what is needed. They are also what’s desperately needed to defeat Trump’s brutal attacks on workers, immigrants, and other oppressed people.

The absence of class-struggle unionism has completely undermined the labor movement and led to the dramatic decline of union membership. For nearly four decades, the labor movement has been denuded of its militancy by business unionist ideas, which has allowed a ravaging of our living standards.

It was revolutionary socialist leadership in the labor movement that led to its greatest upsurge ever in the latter half of the 1930s, including in the auto industry. Under revolutionary leadership, the auto industry was organized, the Teamsters grew into a massive fighting force and transformed the trucking industry, the Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed, the “New Deal” was won through labor militancy, and the fastest period of growth in union membership in U.S. history took place.

Class-Struggle Unionism Requires Breaking from the Democratic and Republican Parties

It is reformism and business unionism that leads union leaders like Fain and O’Brien to hop back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. 

In a recent livestream in response to criticisms for his support of Trump’s tariffs, Fain said, “When we speak out against [billionaire attacks], we get called liberals by the right-wingers. When we speak out in support of tariffs, we get called right-wingers by the liberals. People say we’re flip-flopping or we’re doing a 180. The truth is what we are doing is acting with integrity… We don’t align with any politician or president. We’re negotiating with the Trump administration. Our approach to President Trump is no different than our approach was to President Biden, and it’s no different than our approach at Stellantis or Columbia University or General Dynamics.”

Far from not aligning, Fain cheerled Biden and then Harris during the Presidential election. This was despite the Biden-Harris administration breaking the railroad workers’ strike and carrying out other major attacks on workers, and betraying the promises for a $15 minimum wage, a public healthcare option, and canceling student debt. Fain’s glowing speech in support of Harris at the Democratic National Convention was a shameful spectacle after Harris abandoned Medicare for All, moved dramatically to the right, and backed to the hilt the Gaza genocide, which the UAW rank and file have publicly and unambiguously opposed. Then on January 19th of this year, a day before Trump’s inauguration, Fain declared himself “ready to work with Trump.” Fain’s changing positions are not “a 180” only in the sense that they represent a betrayal of working-class interests on both occasions.

O’Brien allowed himself to be courted by Trump last year. This was after he, as President of the union representing over 40 percent of union freight railroad workers, had given cover for the historic breaking of the railroad workers’ strike by Biden and both the Democrats and Republicans. O’Brien followed this with a speech at the Republican National Convention that will surely go down in the annals as one of the most embarrassing speeches by a labor leader. He fawned over not only Trump but also Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who has a long anti-worker and anti-union track record. O’Brien has also applauded Trump’s pick for Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who has since pledged support for the anti-union, so-called “right to work” laws.

Guastella is not altogether wrong when he says, “if the left cannot offer a compelling exit from neoliberal globalization, it will be unable to effectively combat the GOP’s national populism with a social populism of its own.” Certainly it’s true that Trump and the right wing will not be defeated without the left building a broad working-class fightback to begin reversing the economic devastation suffered by tens of millions of Americans.  However, Guastella, O’Brien, and Fain are dead wrong in linking themselves to Trump and his anti-worker, nationalist agenda. As the heads of some of the largest unions in the U.S., they hardly get to absolve themselves of responsibility. In fact, the business unionist approach of the majority of the current labor leadership is the single most important reason for the stranglehold on militant organizing and failure of a genuine working-class challenge to emerge. We desperately need a new party for working people. If labor leaders with the resources of O’Brien and Fain were to initiate the formation of such a party, millions would join. But we should not hold our breath for it to come from either of them.

The interests of the billionaires and the multimillionaires, the capitalists, are diametrically opposed to the needs of the working class, the poor, the oppressed. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are warmongering parties of the capitalists. This is why we launched Workers Strike Back, because there is an urgent need for a fighting working-class alternative to both the anti-worker parties, and also to the failed union leadership. 

A New World Order …. and an Increasingly Crisis-Ridden Capitalism

It is openly being acknowledged in the bourgeois press that the trade wars are a precursor to potential military conflict between China and the U.S.

While I would disagree with much of the left’s characterization of Trump as a unique figure acting independently of broader developments, his personal qualities do play a role in some of the more extreme aspects of his agenda. The insane scale of his tariff regime is opposed by the ruling class. Trump’s chaotic, unpredictable nature is the main reason he was not preferred by a big section of the American ruling class as their representative. However, they do like significant parts of his agenda. And the general trend towards protectionism, ending of globalization and offshoring, and ramped-up tensions between the U.S. and China are hardly just about Trump. Economic nationalist policies were increasing under Obama, and they continued to increase under Biden. And much of the expansion of tariffs will not go away after Trump 2.0. 

Trump’s first election and also the second one, after leaving as the most unpopular modern president, reflects both the deep crisis in U.S. capitalism and the near-total vacuum in militant working-class leadership. The defining feature of the period is the superpower American capitalist class losing its edge, with the change from a unipolar to a bipolar world, and China moving forward, albeit itself also severely crisis-ridden.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” signature slogan in part captures the global economic and geopolitical reality of the crisis of U.S. capitalism today — the American dream has collapsed. The call to restore it found an echo in the context of cratered living standards, the loss of middle-class-wage jobs, slashing and burning of welfare and basic programs, dismantling of affordable housing and funding for public schools and public infrastructure, and most potently, hollowing out of manufacturing and industry jobs and the creation of economic deserts in the heartland of America. But the American Dream will not be restored on the basis of Trumpism and tariff policies anymore than it would by a return to the neoliberal free trade policies of the prior era. Neither of these policies represent the interests of working people, they are both attempts to maximize profitability at the expense of not only American workers, but workers around the world.

And the American Dream will only sink faster the longer business unionism maintains its grip on the labor movement, and the Democratic and Republican Parties maintain any authority with the working class. We desperately need a new party for working people.

The clock is ticking, because we face the potential of both World War III and an environmental crisis of a severity that could bring down human civilization. Neither of these looming disasters will wait patiently for a powerful workers’ and socialist movement to reappear and set things right — the urgency could not be greater. We need to reject all the false shortcuts being dangled in front of us, and build an independent, militant movement to bring down Trump, the billionaires, both their political parties, and their system.

Kshama Sawant is a revolutionary socialist, a founding member of Workers Strike Back, and a former Seattle City Councilmember who helped win the first $15/hour minimum wage in a major city and the Amazon Tax on wealthy corporations to fund affordable housing.