Buckley Manufacturing Co., a Woodlawn metal stamping company, was being told to expect steel price increases Tuesday as President Bush was announcing tariffs of as much as 30 percent on some steel imports.

        “It's going to dramatically impact our costs, and we're already under severe cost pressure from our customers,” said Mike Strotman, vice president of the 55-year-old company which makes internal structural parts and gas tanks for the Big Three automakers.

        Buckley, which employs 30 at stamping plants in Woodlawn and Springfield Township, uses about 900 tons of steel annually.

        Mr. Strotman said the company is expecting price increases of 10 to 15 percent on the steel it purchases.

        The tariff “will directly affect our bottom line,” he said.

        Buckley isn't alone. Buyers for Batesville, Ind.'s Batesville Casket Co. and Hill-Rom, the hospital bed manufacturer, say the tariff could mean steel price increases of 15 to 20 percent, said Chris Feeney, spokesman for the parent Hillenbrand Industries Inc.

        Whether those costs will be passed on to consumers isn't clear yet, he said.

        “Certainly, it's an incremental cost that we have to monitor,” he said.

        While Buckley expects to survive, Mr. Strotman said a number of other metal stamping operations might not be so lucky.

        “A lot of them are on the brink, and this will push them over the edge,” he said.

        The president's decision to impose a sweeping series of tariffs on a variety of imported steel products for three years was widely hailed by U.S. steel producers and the steelworkers' union and widely derided by steel purchasers.

        “I think everybody was pleasantly surprised by the 30 percent tariff” on flat-rolled steel, said Don Daily, general manager of Gallatin Steel, a flat-rolled steel plant outside Warsaw, Ky. “I think most in the industry had resolved themselves to less than that.”

        And Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, said in a statement: “It's not as comprehensive as we had hoped, but it certainly is the first time we've seen some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.”

        Mr. Daily said the tariffs will give U.S. producers some breathing room while government and industry officials try to figure out how to deal with too much steel capacity worldwide.

        But critics complain that the decision only delays the inevitable in an industry overdue for consolidation and restructuring.

        Dan Cunningham, owner of Long-Stanton Manufacturing Inc., a Hamilton metal stamping plant, said the tariffs — coupled with the recent shutdown of some U.S. steel mills — have raised the prospect of shortages.

        “On some specialty steels, we've had two-week delivery, and now they're saying it will be three or four weeks,” he said. “It's the law of the jungle. If there's a shortage, the price goes up.”

        Long-Stanton, which uses about 4,500 tons of steel annually, has taken steps to insulate itself from shortages by increasing its use of steel supply agreements, he said.

        Mr. Daily said U.S. producers have been helped lately not by a pickup in demand, but by less supply because of the shutdown of LTV Corp.

        “That shutdown has taken five to six million tons out of the market,” he said.

        “The problems facing the (steel) industry are rooted in U.S. capacity, huge retiree health care and pension costs from integrated mills, competition from more efficient U.S. mini-mills and weakness in worldwide steel demand,” said Robert Crandall, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.

        “The steel industry won't get healthy with these tariffs,” said Dennis Cuneo, senior vice president at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Inc. in Erlanger. Toyota is one of a number of large steel users who have opposed tariffs.

        “Steel has been the most protected of U.S. industries,” he said, but the number of U.S. steel industry jobs has declined from 580,000 in the 1970s to about 142,000 today.

        The Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition, a coalition of steel consumers, has estimated that the tariffs will ultimately eliminate 74,500 jobs nationally.

        A study completed late last year for steel-consuming companies estimated that higher prices and other inefficiencies created by higher tariffs would cost consumers up to $4 billion a year.

        Toyota buys all but about 5 percent of the steel in its cars and trucks from U.S. suppliers, Mr. Cuneo said. The steel it does import is special alloy that it can't find in the United States.

        Even so, Mr. Cuneo said Toyota is facing added costs of $5 million to $9 million annually because of the new tariffs. Toyota has filed a request to be exempted from the tariffs because the steel isn't available domestically, he said.

        Supporters say the tariffs won't necessarily mean higher prices for consumers. They say, for example, that lower steel prices over the past couple of years haven't resulted in lower car prices.

        But Mr. Cuneo responds, “That's absolutely wrong.”

        He points to several independent studies showing that new-car prices have fallen each year since 1998.

        Mr. Daily concedes that the tariffs are only a short-term solution.

        “Long term, there has to be less steel capacity,” he said.

        The hope is the tariffs, by restricting the U.S. market, will force other foreign producers and the U.S. to take steps to reduce capacity, he said.

        E-mail mboyer@enquirer.com

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