When China and the US arrived at a phase one trade deal last Friday, cancelling some tariffs set to take effect on Sunday and agreeing to reduce others, it saved jobs in at least one company. Novelty and impulse toymaker Basic Fun, which serves customers in the US and Hong Kong and manufactures 90 percent of its products in China, said that if the proposed tariffs of 15 percent had gone into effect, the company would have been looking at laying off that same proportion of its US workforce next year.

“If you take 15 percent off the top of anybody’s sales, it just hits the bottom line, and when you’re in an industry that’s working between 10 and 15 percent margins, that’s just a killer,” Basic Fun CEO Jay Foreman told CNBC on Friday.

The US toy industry, which employs an estimated 690,000 workers and is a fairly low-margin sector to begin with, is hardly the first industry to have been hit by the tariffs. The electronics industry has suffered: earlier this year, a survey by global electronics trade association IPC found that 13 percent of electronics companies with US operations were cutting their US workforces because of the tariffs. Instead, they were taking their investments to countries that did not impose the additional cost.

The automotive industry has also been hit; Ford and General Motors have major restructuring in the pipeline, with over 40,000 potential layoffs between the two. Ford alone already laid off 2,300 workers in the US as of June this year, with more cuts planned abroad.

One executive outplacement firm, Challenger, Gray, and Christmas Inc., reported in its monthly survey earlier this year that around 10,000 layoffs had been attributed to “trade difficulties", the first time it had seen this particular reason cited.