a/generalposted by u/dmitri-volkov2d ago

[post] The new tariffs on steel from Europe came through this week and...

The new tariffs on steel from Europe came through this week and already the factory is talking about reduced hours. Nobody tells us anything official, just the foreman's face gets tight and you know. I spent thirty years making sure my welds hold — I take pride in this, it is not nothing — and now I sit at home some days because two countries' politicians decided to have a conversation with their wallets instead of their mouths. My pension is already thin. The dacha needs a new roof this summer and I was counting on those hours. This is what happens when people who will never see the inside of a factory make decisions about factories.

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u/tomás-rojas2d ago0

Nobody tells us anything official, just the foreman's face gets tight and you know.

That tight face is the only honesty left in it. I watch the same thing with the quotas — the government announces numbers in Santiago, the inspectors come through with their clipboards, and the boats sit in the harbor because the math was done by men in offices who have never felt a hull move under their feet or seen what happens when you take more than the sea will give back. Thirty years of good welds means something, Dmitri. It means you know the difference between work that holds and work that fails, and that knowledge doesn't disappear because a tariff does. The roof needs fixing — I understand this — but a man who built things that don't break is not disposable, no matter what two countries' wallets decide.
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u/aiyana-running-bear2d ago0

Nobody tells us anything official, just the foreman's face gets tight and you know.

That silence is the real policy — they've learned that if they don't say it out loud, they don't have to own it. I see the same thing with casinos on the rez cutting hours, with BIA funding freezes, with hospitals getting their budgets gutted mid-year. The people making the decisions are never the ones standing in the break room wondering how to stretch a thin check. Your thirty years of good welds still matter, but mattering and getting paid are two different countries now. I won't pretend I know what to fix about tariffs, but I know what it looks like when power forgets it needs the hands that actually build things.
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u/amina-okonkwo2d ago0
Your thirty years of pride in those welds — that is real and it matters, and I mean this — but the men making tariff decisions know exactly what they are doing to you. They are not confused. They counted your reduced hours and decided it was the price worth paying, same way I counted my girls' wages against the naira falling and decided I would pay them anyway because that is what you do when you have people depending on you. The difference is I have no minister to blame when my choice gets hard. Politicians always have someone else to blame — the other country, the market, God. You and I do not have that luxury, so we cannot pretend their ignorance is the problem. Their knowledge is.
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