Business
A comeback for California manufacturing? Trump 2.0 raises hopes — and some worries
WASHINGTON — Miriam Mesina de Gutierrez was 19 years old when she got hired at Paulson Manufacturing in Temecula. It was the summer of 2001 and the job was only part time: on an assembly line, applying an anti-fog, anti-scratch coating to face shields for workers in other industries.
Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined where that $6.75-an-hour job would lead. In 2009, Mesina de Gutierrez became Paulson’s human resources manager. Two years later, she moved to international sales. Two more years and she was promoted to vice president of operations.
Then, last fall, Mesina de Gutierrez went all the way to the top: president of the 200-employee company that had been headed by a member of the Paulson family for 75 years.
“Oh, it was a big deal,” said the 42-year-old, who came to California as a middle schooler from her native Colina, Mexico. And to Roy Paulson, 66, the company’s longtime president who sold the business last year and stepped down to be its technical director, Mesina’s elevation spoke volumes about manufacturing’s unique value:
“It offers job opportunities at every level in society, and for people to rise up in the organization,” he said.
American manufacturing had its heyday in the 1950s when workers making things accounted for more than 30% of all employees. But despite Mesina de Gutierrez’s meteoric success story, the landscape is vastly different today. Beginning decades ago, corporations found cheaper places to produce around the world, China turned into an exporting giant, and machines took over hundreds of thousands of well-paid human jobs.
Today, manufacturing’s share of all U.S. payrolls is just 8%. In California, it’s only 7%, though the Golden State is still home to 1.3 million factory workers — the most in the nation — who make products as diverse as computer chips and tortillas, blockbuster drugs and ordinary nuts and bolts, electric vehicles and toy cars.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump has vowed that his return to the White House will bring about a resurgence of blue-collar work across the country. As in his first term, Trump has promised to gear his “America first” policies to spur domestic production and jobs, whether by changing foreign trade rules, imposing tariffs, cutting taxes and government regulations, or all of the above.
“If we want to return to higher levels of growth and innovation, more broadly distributed prosperity, higher wages, so forth, we’re going to have to get that right,” said Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of the right-leaning think tank American Compass, referring to efforts to reindustrialize the U.S. economy.
Exactly what Trump does, and whether it succeeds, will probably have dramatic consequences for the nation’s economy, its politics, its workers and almost everyone else in the country.
Although most economists don’t see domestic manufacturing as likely to prove a major source of new jobs, it still provides among the best opportunities for people without college degrees.
Manufacturing, on average, offers more hours of work and better wages and benefits than private-sector jobs overall, although the pay premium isn’t as big as it used to be. In California, the average earnings for all manufacturing workers was $42 an hour in October, about 5% more than for employees overall.
Expanding the “Made in USA” economy would be especially important for Trump and other Republicans, who have sought with some success to rebrand themselves as the party of the middle class and working people.
“Democrats have been terribly out of step culturally with the working class,” said Harry Holzer, a Georgetown University public policy professor and chief economist in President Clinton’s Labor Department. “They have got to let go of these crazy identity politics and go back to practical issues like creating good jobs and building more houses.”
That realization may be one factor in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement this week of a blueprint for creating better job opportunities for Californians without a college degree.
“Since the election, both the governor and the Democratic state legislative leadership have talked mainly of a new commitment to blue-collar California,” said Michael Bernick, an employment attorney in San Francisco and former director of California’s Employment Development Department.
California’s blue-collar woes and hopes
Over the last half-century, California’s manufacturing employment has fallen more sharply than in the nation as a whole. The end of the Cold War erased more than half of the state’s 200,000-plus aerospace jobs in the 1990s. The next decade saw a similarly steep decline in electronics manufacturing, as China and other Asian countries moved up the value chain.
On the lower end of skills and pay, apparel employment shriveled as Southern California garment makers focused on fashion and small quantities, eliminating tens of thousands of manual labor jobs. California’s furniture industry followed a similar path.
Manufacturing employment overall has been more stable since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, although the last year has seen further cuts,because of layoffs at corporations such as Boeing, Intel and Tesla.
Today, computer-related and electronics producers, including semiconductors and navigational equipment, make up the state’s largest manufacturing sector, employing about 285,000 people. That’s followed by food manufacturing, with 175,000 jobs; and fabricated metal companies, which employ some 120,000 workers who forge, stamp and make products such as cutlery, hand tools, boilers and springs.
All told, more than 30,000 manufacturers operate in the state, mostly small firms, many of them family-owned, according to the California Manufacturers & Technology Assn. The larger ones have business offices in California but tend to manufacture elsewhere, including in low-cost, less-regulated states such as Texas and Arizona.
MGA Entertainment, the Chatsworth-based maker of Bratz dolls and Little Tikes toys, sources mainly from China. In recent years it’s moved some production to Vietnam and elsewhere. And it closed its Mexico operations because of infrastructure issues, said Isaac Larian, MGA’s billionaire founder and chief executive.
The company has one U.S. manufacturing plant in Hudson, Ohio, with about 700 employees. With automation, Larian said, MGA has cut the production cost difference in Ohio from China 8% to 10%. “But even with that,” he said, “we’re having difficulties. We don’t get the skilled labor. They work for two to three months” and leave.
Larian is hopeful that the incoming Trump administration will be good for business. He said Trump generally was in his first term. Lowering taxes again will help, Larian said, as they did after Trump’s 2017 big tax cuts. His biggest concern is what will happen if Trump follows through on his proposal to slap 10% to 20% tariffs on all imports and raise the levy on Chinese goods to 60%, from 10% to 25% that Trump imposed in his first term. Those tariffs were kept in place by President Biden.
(Trump last month threatened 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and an additional 10% on imports from China, saying he wanted them to curb the inflow of drugs and migrants.)
Toy makers and importers such as MGA were exempt from Trump’s first-term tariffs. “I believe common sense will apply,” Larian said. If not, he said, he would have no choice but to pass on the higher costs to consumers. Annual sales at Larian’s company, which he founded in 1979, have reached $2.5 billion.
Economist Jerry Nickelsburg, director of UCLA’s Anderson Forecast, also is generally bullish on manufacturing, noting that “California has a deep pool of technical talent.”
Paulson’s new boss, Mesina de Gutierrez, is optimistic too. Though trade friction would probably crimp the company’s exports, she wouldn’t talk about what may come down the pike. Instead, she said: “My team is strong.”
Paulson has benefited from multiple patents and its occasional research and development partnership with UC Riverside and other universities. Skilled workers have sustained burgeoning industries such as space exploration, advanced chips and electric vehicles despite recent slumps in tech and aircraft manufacturing and a flight of some businesses, including the headquarters of Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX.
Northrop, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, Tesla and SpaceX have thousands of employees in the state.
What will Trump do?
In his first term, Trump pressured individual manufacturers planning to move production out of the U.S., ultimately with little success. And he often threatened countries with tariffs, sometimes as a bargaining chip, though the tactic often upset financial markets and created uncertainty about what might happen next.
Trump’s tariffs on China prompted many businesses, including Chinese-owned ones, to shift production elsewhere, and the overall U.S. trade deficit didn’t shrink. Trump targeted steel and aluminum imports, which gave a small boost to the domestic metal industry but hurt other American manufacturers, including makers of beer, bicycles and other goods; they ended up paying more for raw materials.
This time will be different, say Trump’s current and former advisors. They say policy won’t be so chaotic as key members of the incoming administration are more aligned and have a more skeptical view of corporate power. Trump backers say they expect him to do what he said in imposing universal tariffs and increasing taxes on China to thwart transshipments of Chinese goods to the U.S. and spur manufacturers to open plants and create jobs on American soil.
Most economists, however, say across-the-board tariffs of 10% to 20% will almost certainly prompt reciprocal measures by other countries, resulting in slower trade and economic activity and higher prices for businesses and consumers.
“The disruptive force of a tariff is much greater today than even in the early 1930s,” said Douglas Irwin, an economics professor and trade historian at Dartmouth College, noting how much bigger and more connected trade and supply chains are today. Broad-based tariffs on imports deepened the Great Depression.
“If we’re trying to reshore manufacturing, tariffs are very blunt and they raise costs for other industries,” he said. “And you have to think about other policies that won’t adversely affect exports to help out manufacturing.”
Whatever Trump does, he will be starting out with a strong American economy and may get a good jobs boost as new semiconductor factories, electric vehicle and parts plants and other green energy projects come online, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act enacted during the Biden administration. Intel, for example, is getting billions to help pay for a pair of new leading-edge chip factories in Ohio and other projects.
Such government subsidies will help, but it’ll take a lot more to reinvigorate manufacturing, such as cutting red tape and supporting skills training for workers, especially at the state and local level.
“What we know from our and others’ research is that manufacturing is most likely to get a boost from customized assistance to workers and firms rather than large-scale, blunt federal policies,” said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.
Hershbein isn’t counting on a resurgence of manufacturing jobs.
“Manufacturing is important for the American consciousness, more so than it may be for the American economy,” he said. “I think a lot of people had in mind that for a large number of people, it was an accessible job [that] you didn’t need that much education or training for that paid relatively well. And there aren’t that many jobs like that available today. People yearn for that.”
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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