STEEL & ALUMINUM TARIFF IMPACT – ROUNDTABLE OPPORTUNITY WITH CONGRESSMAN

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Come and voice your opinion on the Steel & Aluminum Tariff Impact related to your business.

The GTAMC & Kent Wood (Director of Government Relations) of the Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce have put together a roundtable opportunity to discuss your concerns with Congressman Bergman on April 23rd from 10-11am in the Chamber Blue Room.

“Though the tariff has already gone into effect, comments and exclusion requests are still open until May 18^th, so the meeting would still be timely in that sense. Also, as NAFTA, this 232 tariff, and other trade issues continue to swirl, I believe it would still be timely to discuss the impacts tariffs and other trade policies have on small businesses and manufacturers in Congressman Bergman’s district so he has a baseline understanding when future issues come up.” ~ Kent Wood

From the perspective of a medium sized manufacturer, our concern is that our level of priority at domestic suppliers will be at risk and that our lead-times will dramatically increase.  We have already experienced an increase in lead-times and with the lack of domestic capacity this could potentially continue to get worse.

This reminds me of the capacity struggle coming out of the 2008 recession while leading the supply chain activities for a carbide tooling manufacturer.  The capacity of the carbide blank supply base was maxed out and the ability for some companies to purchase carbide was impossible.  If you were not a large enough customer or an existing customer you could not purchase carbide blanks, regardless of price, and there were manufacturers that went out of business for the simple reason of availability.

If you are interested in attending and sharing your concerns with this issue, please write to jdreher@tentcraft.com

This is a great opportunity for us to collaborate on a very important subject.  Please attend if you can make the time.