(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden’s trade and labor chiefs traveled to the election battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday to tout the administration’s use of tariffs and industrial policy as a way to protect steelworkers from unfair competition.
It was billed as an official visit, not a campaign stop, but the political implications were clear as Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Julie Su, the acting Secretary of Labor, toured the floor of a mill filled with thick slabs at a Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. steel plant in Coatesville, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) west of Philadelphia.
“The reason why this industry is so important to our country is its criticality to our lifeblood, the lifeblood of our economy, to creating jobs,” Tai told dozens of Cleveland-Cliffs workers wearing orange protective jackets and yellow hard hats in a cavernous mill that contributes to building submarines, aircraft carriers and bridges. “It’s about the quality of the jobs — whether or not those are jobs that lead to a path in the middle class for generations.”
Without naming Vice President Kamala Harris’s Republican opponent, Tai drew a contrast between the Biden administration’s use of tariffs — which last month included finalizing higher duties on Chinese electric vehicles and semiconductors — and those of former President Donald Trump, who is locked in a close race with Harris ahead of the Nov. 5 vote.
“I’m just going to say here to this crowd, the company and the workers, you understand better than anybody how tariffs can be used constructively to level the playing field, to give all of us a fighting chance, and also how tariffs can be used recklessly,” she said.
Trump has vowed to impose 60% tariffs on imports from China and 10% duties on those from the rest of the world.
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Su was more direct, saying that Trump always promised to have an “infrastructure week” focused on investments in the nation’s highways and bridges, but never did, while during Biden’s presidency Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as well as major investments in green energy and semiconductor production.
The subtext of the election less than a month away was unmistakable in a town of some 13,000 people that sits about midway between Philadelphia and Lancaster County, known as Amish country. Polls show an almost dead heat in the state between Harris and Trump.
In April, Biden proposed new 25% tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum as part of a series of steps to shore up the American metals sector. That politically appealing vow was viewed as largely symbolic, because China currently exports little of either metal to the US. USTR has also opened an investigation into China’s shipbuilding industry.
The metals tariff move was part of a larger review by Tai’s office of tariffs that Trump first imposed starting in 2018, alleging Chinese theft of intellectual property from US companies and forced technology transfers.
Also hanging in the air was Cleveland-Cliff’s bid to buy Pittsburgh-based US Steel Corp. The United Steel Workers union has publicly backed Cleveland-Cliffs’s attempt to buy the bigger company and keep it in American hands. But US Steel agreed in December to sell itself to Japan’s Nippon Steel Corp. for $14.1 billion.
The takeover saga has touched off an election-year firestorm in Pennsylvania. Biden, Harris and Trump oppose the sale, while others, including Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, have avoiding explicitly taking sides.
Biden was preparing to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, Bloomberg News reported last month, citing people familiar with the matter.
(Updates with comment from labor secretary in seventh paragraph.)
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