Senator Hassan Visits Businesses in Keene and Gilsum, Discusses Impact of Administration’s Tariffs and Importance of Supporting Family-Friendly Policies

KEENE – Senator Maggie Hassan visited businesses in Keene and Gilsum yesterday, hearing about their priorities and discussing her bipartisan efforts to support innovation, expand economic opportunity, and help grow New Hampshire’s economy.

Senator Hassan visited The Mountain in Keene, a New Hampshire-based eco-friendly apparel company known for its Three Wolf Moon design, to discuss how tariffs are impacting their business. Learn more about The Mountain here.

Earlier in Gilsum, Senator Hassan spoke to the Co-CEOs of Badger about their family-friendly policies that support their workers both in the workplace and at home. Senator Hassan visited Badger when she was Governor to sign legislation giving New Hampshire businesses the ability to register as a Benefit Corporation, a for-profit designation that prioritizes social impact in addition to profit. Learn more about Badger here.

“It was great to visit The Mountain and Badger to hear more about their priorities and how they are helping drive our economy forward,” Senator Hassan said. “I will continue working across party lines to protect business from the harmful effects of the President’s trade war and to bolster efforts at the federal level to encourage more employers to adopt family-friendly policies.”

"We appreciated the visit from Senator Hassan and the work she's doing to support NH businesses," said Emily Schwerin-Whyte, Co-CEO of Badger. "On our tour, we talked about family-friendly practices to help make businesses competitive employers, and also shared the challenges we face with the rising costs of health insurance and barriers to onsite solar."

“There is no doubt that the trade war has hurt our bottom line, and we were particularly impacted by the European Union’s retaliatory tariffs on pulp and cotton, which made it a lot more expensive for our company to manufacture apparel,” said Jeff Grosner, Director of Manufacturing at The Mountain. “I am grateful for Senator Hassan’s efforts to reduce the burden of these tariffs for our business and fight back against these senseless trade policies.”

To help protect Granite State businesses from damaging trade wars, Senator Hassan recently joined her colleagues in introducing bipartisan legislation, the Trade Certainty Act, that would ensure that presidents – regardless of which party holds the White House – cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs unilaterally. Additionally, during a Senate Finance Committee hearing with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Senator Hassan raised the importance of having a functional exclusion process in place, so that businesses can make the case to the United States Trade Representative for exempting particular products from tariffs. 

Additionally, in an effort to ensure family-friendly policies are available to all workers, Senator Hassan cosponsored the FAMILY Act, which would create a universal, gender-neutral paid family and medical leave program to help support all family caregivers in the workforce. The Senator also joined a number of her colleagues in introducing the Child Care for Working Families Act, a comprehensive bill to ensure that hard-working families have access to affordable, high-quality child care and preschool.

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