DEAR EDITOR:

We are so pleased and excited that Kimberly-Clark has chosen to heavily invest in our area to develop a huge manufacturing and distribution center here for its products. But one thing I have not seen in our local media is anything about what Kimberly-Clark plans to manufacture at this new facility.

If we go back to COVID, the health care industry was at the mercy of China because virtually all of the health care sterile and nonsterile synthetic fabric-based disposable products (masks, gowns, etc.) all came from China. Hospitals, like the one I worked in, just could not get enough of these products. Indeed, some started coming in with just Chinese writing on them. This was a big wake-up call that China was playing way too big of a role in our critical product needs. Now, jump to the high tariffs that Trump has placed on goods coming from China, making a big incentive for companies to return manufacturing capacity to the United States.

One of Kimberly-Clark’s major product divisions is what I would call “disposable synthetic fabric” products. This would include not only those masks, gauze bandages, and gowns so critical to health care but many personal hygiene products as well. I took a quick look in the store and found that the Depend® and Poise® brands of personal care and hygiene products are both Kimberly-Clark brands, and all the packages I looked at said that they were “Made in China.” Other Kimberly-Clark consumer brands include Huggies®, Kleenex®, Cottonelle®, and Kotex®.

Connect the dots: Trump creates incentives for companies to return manufacturing capacity to the United States, and Kimberly-Clark decides to invest in a huge new manufacturing facility here in our area. I wonder what it is going to manufacture there, and I wonder how many of our local residents “with TDS” will refuse to take a good-paying job there because a lot of the reason that the plant and jobs are opening is because of “the orange man.”

He created the incentives through tariffs to bring back the jobs and grow the local tax base here in the USA.

PAUL WITKOWSKI

Canfield