‘Stop the Nonsense’ With Tariffs, Says This New York Manufacturing CEO
Like pretty much every small business in America, the Plattco Corporation doesn’t have a direct line to the White House, and CEO Michele Derrigo-Barnes can’t call up the president to get special tariff exemptions.
So when I asked Derrigo-Barnes what she would tell President Donald Trump (or his top trade advisor Peter Navarro) if she had the chance, she gave a light chuckle and then took a deep breath.
“Stop the nonsense,” she replied. “I would say, ‘You’re killing the American people.’ We’ve worked hard to get us to a place where we can perform well, and we can take care of our customers, and this is putting that in jeopardy. And the people that we have employed here have really good lives, and you’re putting that at stake.”
The Plattco Corporation was founded in the late 1890s—that supposed golden age that Trump believes his tariffs will somehow resurrect—and for well over a century, it has been designing and manufacturing industrial valves used by mining companies, power plants, printing presses, and a wide range of other trades.
A valve might be just one small piece of some larger industrial process, but Derrigo-Barnes explains that every valve Plattco makes contains a bunch of smaller parts—a body, an arm, a link, a cover, a seat, a flapper, air cylinders, and ball bearings. Some of those pieces are produced at the company’s Plattsburgh, New
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