Massachusetts exporters brace for Trump presidency impacts
Kinefac Corp. employee Roger Harpin works on a Kine-Spin centrifugal cleaning machine. The Worcester manufacturer exports these machines, as well as metal formers and coilers.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election night win, manufacturing companies are bracing to see how the president-elect’s positions on trade will affect exporting in Central Massachusetts.
“It is just really hard to say. When you hear campaign promises -- from ‘we’re going to tear up agreements’ to ‘we’re going to renegotiate agreements’ -- to renegotiate is one thing but tearing them up is another,” said Julia Dvorko, Central Massachusetts regional director at the Massachusetts Export Center.
Over the course of the campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized U.S. trade policy, at one point calling the North American Free Trade Agreement “the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.” Trump’s campaign website says he is in favor of renegotiating NAFTA and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which hasn’t yet been ratified, but his transition team’s website doesn’t mention any specifics under the “trade reform” section.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama said pulling out of trade deals to protect domestic workers would be disruptive to the global supply chain, according to Politico.
Dvorko said since there’s so much uncertainty surrounding what may or may not happen, it’s business as usual for Central Massachusetts exporting manufacturers until action is taken.
“People here, in the manufacturing community, in the exporting community, they're in the ‘wait and see’ mode, trying to see what that will mean for them. It’s only been a week.”
In total, Massachusetts brought in about $25.2 billion in export revenue in 2015, according to the Foreign Trade Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the International Trade Administration, 111,875 U.S. jobs were supported by goods exports from Massachusetts in 2015, and 91% of these jobs were supported by manufactured goods exports. In that same year, exports to free-trade agreements markets accounted for 33 percent of Massachusetts exports, a figure that has grown by 46 percent since 2005.
Free trade agreements are usually good for small manufacturers, like many companies in Central Massachusetts, Dvorko said.
Even if the president-elect rolls out substantial trade policies in his first 100 days in office, Dvorko said she thinks it will be a while before they are instituted.
“We are looking much longer term here, making it even more difficult to guess,” she said.
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