HIBBING, Minn. — Until everything came to a halt in mid-March, Jon Bird worked 12-hour shifts, four days a week — shoveling rock, hosing mud and operating enormous iron ore crushers at a mine in northern Minnesota.

The mines in the state’s Iron Range — where Bird was born and raised, and where his father, grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the pits before him — sit atop a domestic supply funnel. The ore, extracted and crushed, is further processed, shipped, smelted in a blast furnace, transformed into steel, then taken to assembly lines, where it becomes appliances and automobiles.

But demand for cars and other big-ticket, metal-filled items slumped in 2024, a rough year for the industry. The steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs, which owns the mine where Bird works, reported a $483 million loss for the first three months of 2025, which meant jobs were on the line, including his.

When Bird, 33, found out that he was being laid off, he did not hear it from “Cliffs,” he said. Rather, he learned about it in a breaking news segment on the local television station, WDIO, while with his children on one of his days off. About 1,200 Cleveland-Cliffs employees were affected, 600 of them in Minnesota.

To find out you’re losing your job that way, he said, “it feels like a slap in the face, honestly, from corporate America.”

Yet one thing currently uniting Cleveland-Cliffs and Bird, a member of the United Steelworkers union, is support for President Donald Trump’s tariffs: a 25% tax on steel and aluminum imports and a 25% tariff on all imported cars.

A wide range of economists think that Trump’s global tariff campaign could hasten an economic downturn, even as he has rolled back its most extreme, across-the-board elements over the past month. A prolonged downturn, or mere slowdown, could further dampen demand for steel products.

Both the steel companies and the steelworkers union, however, believe that tariffs can help protect, and even revitalize, domestic production over the long run. Fending off consistently lower-priced Chinese steel — produced with cheaper labor and state subsidies — is a stated aim of the White House.

Bird said he didn’t get why Trump wanted to tax everything from coffee to mangoes, but that steel tariffs made sense to him because of the availability — even a current surplus — of homegrown ore.

“America imports a bunch of stuff from everyone because we just don’t have everything,” he said. “But maybe we should stop trying to get things that we already have from everywhere else and just do it here, you know?”

Still, the lines between hurting foreign trade adversaries and helping domestic production are blurry in the modern economy. Although tariffs are expected to dampen the American appetite for Chinese steel this year, according to analysts at S&P Global Commodity Insights, American steel and auto producers are also being hit with higher costs for the imported parts and finished goods that they use.

People in support of tariffs are making a bet, to one extent or another, that the domestic ecosystem of mining workers and steel companies can survive what the president calls a “transition” and come out the better for it.

“We firmly believe that the Trump administration is spot-on in its push to bring back manufacturing to the United States” in the long term, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves told analysts on a recent earnings call. “However, in the short term, we need to do everything we can to make sure that we remain cost competitive.”

The chatter around the mining towns of St. Louis County is that most miners may not be called back to work until the winter holidays, or even well after that if auto sales fail to pick up soon. In preparation, Minnesota legislators are debating proposals to extend the miners’ unemployment insurance benefits until late December, beyond the usual 26 weeks.

Keeping skilled miners in the region is a bipartisan priority, from the office of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz in the state capital of St. Paul to red rural stretches far north.

Mining has a small footprint in terms of total employment in the state. But the fear is that if mining withers away in the face of foreign competition, then much of northern Minnesota may end up hollowed out like some other parts of the Upper Midwest.

“If we do not get this extension and provide hope to our members, they will not be able to stay, as a lot of them are young, with children,” Al King, president of United Steelworkers Local 6115, said during a state legislative committee hearing in April.

A common complaint by economists about protectionist policies is that the “wage premium” for most manufacturing jobs is often overstated and that populist nostalgia for a bygone manufacturing heyday is misplaced.

But unionized mining jobs in the Iron Range still pay well.

Bird makes $112,000 to $125,000 a year with overtime. That is well above the per capita income of $39,778 in St. Louis County, or the $61,140 typical of someone working in maintenance and repair jobs.

“Mining is a trickle-down economy,” said Teresa Appelwick, president of the Laurentian Chamber of Commerce, which represents businesses in the “Quad Cities” of the range and “does not have an official stance” on Trump’s tariff campaign.

At the entrance to a mining museum in Chisholm is an 85-foot-tall “Iron Man” monument, topped by a chiseled miner holding a pick and shovel — a memorial to the achievements and history of the professional extractors in the pits.

Minnesota iron built skyscrapers and railroads, backed by titans of industry such as the Carnegies and Rockefellers. In World War II, its iron became tanks, planes and ships that won battles.

The hope around the Iron Range is that the industry is not soon relegated to a museum artifact.

Trump has vowed to bring back some of the grand-scale manufacturing. In April, he signed an executive order aimed at bulking up the atrophied U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry, which has been outcompeted globally, especially by China.

The potential for more domestic shipbuilding could mean a greater market for American-made steel. The mere possibility of that shift has excited plenty of members in the United Steelworkers union.

Over burgers at Palmers Tavern, a place in Hibbing for hockey watch parties, Bird said he had heard of the shipbuilding proposals.

And he declared himself a fan.

“I’m biased as a miner,” he said with a laugh. “But I think that’d be a great idea.”