Now, while Trump's latest rates are settling in – even at a rate lower by 10% – many workers in the clothing and shoes industry will fear for their jobs.
But even these “lucky” sufficient to keep them confronting increasing pressures to produce more, and faster, to compensate for the increase in costs – directly to their own financial security and well -being.
The idea that prices will ultimately take jobs in the United States ignore this fact that these precarious, underpaid and often dangerous jobs are not the kind of jobs that all American would like.
Sometimes there is no alternative
And the evidence suggests that even if they wanted them, the international manufacturing supply chains are more deeply rooted than people might think.
After the EU imposed its prices in Cambodia, for example, the brands could have sought to get around these additional costs by moving production. It turned out that the volume of trade between Cambodia and the EU has remained stable since – because sometimes there is no alternative.
With Cambodia, companies did not want to or be able to transform production to competitors such as Bangladesh, Myanmar or Sri Lanka, partly due to political volatility in these countries.
