From a square -like office and warehouse complex in Vernon Hills, Illinois, about twenty miles to the north from Ohair Airport in Chicago, Rick Woldenberg has a direct view of how global capitalism works – or how it works until recently. The sixty -five -year -old from Princeton is from the entrepreneurial family. In the sixties of the nineteenth century, his father established a company to provide schools with products designed to help learning, such as reading and mathematics groups. At eighty, his mother founded a sister company, which initially provided other companies in the same industry. Since then, Woldenberg family companies, which are now called learning resources and Hand2Mind, have grown to become a company that employs more than five hundred people and sells everything from messages blocks to construction groups, along with Cooper, coding robot.
Woldenberg joined learning resources in 1990 and became the CEO after eight years. Since 2019, Hand2Mind has also been running. Companies products are designed in Vernon Hills and Torrance, California, where there is another office, but almost all elements are manufactured in Asia mainly in China. Some of them enter O’Hare, but most of them are shipped to the ports on the western coast, then they are delivered by railway to an Illinois warehouse or sent to customers. These days, distributors include Scholachic, Walmart and Amazon.
In the first years, Woldenbergs made some of their games and learning tools in factories in the United States. However, in the 1980s and early 1990s, they transferred all their production to the factories in China and Taiwan, where the association’s workers obtained a part of what their American counterparts did. “Everyone found low -cost manufacturers abroad to build their products, and American manufacturers were unable to match them,” Windenberg told me a coffee weeks in Awhair Hilton. “We were in the most competitive consumer market in the world, and I didn’t think we had a choice.” He said that the transfer of production abroad has enabled the company to employ more people in the United States, including product designers, sales representatives, administrative employees and warehouse workers. He said: “I do not feel guilty about what we did.” “We have created more than five hundred jobs with good wages, and selling our products in more than a hundred countries.” (According to Circhana, a market search company, Tearing Resources is the largest twenty -five games in the United States)
On April 2, which Donald Trump It is called “Editing DayThe President announced a blanket tariff that raised the tax on Chinese imports to one hundred and forty-five percent, which increases the Wordenberg-and-many business model. Definitions are primarily taxes, and importers get the option to wander in new spirits. I met him, the White House announced that the customs tariff for Chinese goods will be reduced for ninety days, to thirty percent, while negotiations between the two countries welcomed these news, but in the field of business that the manufacturing orders should create. Conditions? ”Walldenberg said.
Woldenberg’s first response to the liberation day tariff was to stop his plans to build a new warehouse. His second response was to prosecute Trump and the administration. On April 22, lawyers who are acting for learning resources and Hand2Mind filed a lawsuit at the Federal Court, in Washington, DC, which described Trump’s tariff as “the seizure of the exceptional executive authority” that “hurt the two companies in an unable to stomach.” Under the constitution, the lawsuit said, Trump had no legal authority to impose these definitions without obtaining the approval of Congress. She asked the court to prevent the government from collecting definitions from Wanderanberg companies. She also called on the case for compensation.
The case was presented in a moment when the major companies were, such as HASBRO and Mattel, standing, and it seems careful not to confront the White House. But Woldenberg, who holds JD from the University of Chicago Law Faculty and who worked for a corporate law firm before joining family business, was on this way before. In 2017, during the first period of Trump, he helped lead in opposition to the game industry for a proposal to a “border modification tax”-a kind of collective tariff-that the Republicans, under pressure from the administration, were considering including the Great Tax Cutting Bill. (The proposal has not entered into the final legislation.) Now that Trump has avoided Congress and claimed the right to impose definitions at the will, Woldenberg takes the White House directly. He said: “In the past, I supported the two parties, and I do not think about myself as a political person.” “But I will defend our mission, and I will defend our employees. This is an old work, and I feel a certain responsibility for it. I will not allow Mr. Trump to keep us away from us.”
There are commercial laws that enable the president to impose customs duties in specific cases, such as when a foreign country is involved in unfair commercial practices. However, these laws do not cover a Trump blanket tariff that was presented on April 2. In the announcement of the fees, the administration, instead with a different basic system, cited the 1977 IEEPA Economic Forces Law (IEPA), which was used by former presidents to freeze foreign assets during national security crises. In a court hearing in Washington two weeks ago, the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice argued that the Trump tariff was a national security issue and that a decision against the administration “will kneel on the world stage, paralyze his ability to negotiate commercial deals and strike the government’s ability to respond. Future national emergencies.” (The government also asked the court to transfer the case to another place, which is the Federal International Trade Court, in Manhattan, where the cases related to trade are often heard) This case is not related to definitions Qua Contraras wrote: “It is about whether IEEPA enables the president to impose, attach, stop, stop, and rest up customs tariffs. The court agrees with the prosecutors that no.”
On facing things, this referee handed over a great victory over Woldenberg, who attended the session with his wife and three children, and they all work at work. Judge Contraras’s decision came just one day after a federal court canceled some definitions on the day of liberation in Trump. On May 28, a committee of three judges heard two separate cases before the International Trade Court decided that the definitions on April 2 “exceed any authority granted to the president by IEPA.” These cases were brought in a row, by five small companies supported by a liberal legal group, and a group of democratic state lawyers.
The negative rulings in the two trials were a major legal setback for the White House. However, it is still out of clear, whether they will lead to any major changes in the TROMP tariff policies – or to permanent relief from their provisions in Woldenberg and others in similar predicament. Judge Contraras initially postponed the enforcement of his matter for fourteen days, to give the administration time to appeal, and last week he stopped the podm order while this process operates on its way through the DC Court. Meanwhile, the International Trade Community Court that blocks the Trump tariff was already suspended. A day after the ruling, the US Court of Appeal of the Federal Department remained awaiting more legal arguments.
