The Trade Wars Are Tricky Even for Domestic Manufacturers

A reporter’s tour of Louisville shows mixed results for Made in America businesses.

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:

• Liz Picarazzi is looking for the best ways to tell customers that their prices are rising.

• The brothers who own one of America’s best restaurants are parting ways.

• Producers of plant-based eggs and premium eggs are seizing the moment.

• This is starting to look like a tough year for U.S.-based travel and retail businesses.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE

Louisville seems poised to benefit from a heightened interest in domestic manufacturing, but the trade tension is complicating things: “Mr. Trump celebrates protective duties on imports as a way to force companies to abandon low-wage centers of manufacturing like China. Yet the consequences of tariffs could threaten jobs that are already here. The Zoeller Pump Company has been in business for 86 years, remaining in Louisville even as competing manufacturers shifted production overseas. Its chief executive, Bill Zoeller, whose great-grandfather founded the company, embraces the ‘Made in America’ label as both an ethos and a marketing advantage.”

• “The company’s pumps go into homes, apartment blocks and commercial structures. When its supplier of motors, General Electric, moved to Mexico two decades ago, the company bought a domestic manufacturer to preserve its identity as an American concern.”

• “The company’s newest employees start at $24 an hour, Mr. Zoeller said. It manages to pay such relatively high wages by focusing on high-quality products that it can sell for a premium. Zoeller has also invested in automation. On its factory floor, five swing-arm robots oversee work previously handled by a dozen people. They pivot swiftly and lunge toward surrounding machinery, picking up metal parts and inspecting them for imperfections.”

• “The robots are not there to replace people, factory managers said, but rather to liberate workers from tedious and grueling tasks, freeing them for jobs that require dexterity and judgment. Over the last six years, Zoeller’s workforce has grown to more than 300 from 220. But now Zoeller is also in the cross-hairs of the unfolding trade war.”

• “The company relies on its own factory in Canada to make control panels for its largest pump systems. The 25-percent tariffs on imports that Mr. Trump threatened on products from Canada, before a reprieve on Monday, confronted Zoeller with a major operational challenge. ‘If we’re the bad guys on this,’ Mr. Zoeller said, ‘then everybody’s the bad guys.’” READ MORE