The miners who lost their jobs, but not their faith, in Trump's tariffs

With demand for steel down and a trade war underway, miners in the Iron Range of Minnesota are feeling the hit, but they hope better times are ahead, writes Talmon Joseph Smith from New York

- Talmon Joseph Smith

Until everything came to a halt in mid-March, Jon Bird worked 12-hour shifts, four days a week - shovelling rock, hosing mud and operating enormous iron ore crushers at a mine in northern Minnesota.

The mines in the state's Iron Range, where Mr Bird was born and raised - and where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the pits before him - sit atop a domestic supply funnel. The ore, extracted and crushed, is further processed, shipped, smelted in a blast furnace, transformed into steel, then taken to assembly lines, where it is shaped into appliances and automobiles.

But demand for cars and other big-ticket, metal-filled items slumped in 2024, a rough year for the industry. The steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs, which owns the mine where Mr Bird works, reported a $483 million loss for the first three months of 2025, which meant jobs were on the line, including his.

When Mr Bird, 33, found out that he was being laid off, he did not hear it from "Cliffs." he said. Rather, he learned about it in a breaking news segment on the local television station, WDIO, while with his children on one of his days off. Some 1,200 Cleveland-Cliffs employees were affected, 600 them in Minnesota.

"It's a hell of a way to find out you're losing your job," he said. "It feels like a slap in the face, honestly, from corporate America."

Yet one thing currently uniting Cleveland-Cliffs and Mr Bird, a member of the United Steelworkers union, is support for President Trump's tariffs: a 25% tax on steel and aluminium imports along with a 25% tariff on all imported cars.

A wide range of economists think that Trump's global tariff campaign could hasten an economic downturn, even as he has rolled back its most extreme, across-the-board elements over the past month. A prolonged downturn, or mere slowdown, could further dampen demand for steel products.