North America’s steel and aluminum industry has been in the forefront with mounting tariff battles raising major concerns for local businesses in the industry, but also reminding some of a day when steel production was thriving in the area.
Tariffs on aluminum and steel imports currently sit at 25 percent, with President Donald Trump saying more could come at the start of April.
The trickle-down effect in Western New York has already been significant, Rigidized Metals President Rick Smith said.
“There’s got to be some adjustments. And so how that affects the business overall, well, there’s less people to hire because we’re paying a lot more for our inputs,” he said. “There’s less capital expenditure, so it trickles down to everywhere in the economy.”
Rigidized Metals has around 60 employees and doesn’t handle raw metals.
But Buffalo and the surrounding area have a significant history from when companies like Bethlehem Steel and Republic Steel were thriving.
Bethlehem Steel employed 20,000 workers at its height around 50 years ago, while Republic employed another 3,000, Steel Plant Museum President Don Williams said.
“There were three times as many employees, as I’ve just mentioned, in manufacturing using our product,” he said. “Not only the employees were hurt by the demise of the two plants here, but the downstream manufacturers using our product were hurt also.”
Bethlehem Steel produced more than 6 million tons of steel at its peak around the late 1970s, with much of it staying locally at places like the Ford plant, Williams said.
He says increasing production and equipment expenses contributed to the two companies’ local demise, and what has kept the industry from coming back.
“It is extremely expensive, in the billion-dollar-plus range, to build a new steel plant, to make steel the way we did here at Lackawanna.
