Blog

By
Leo W. Gerard
United Steelworkers International President
and
Cathy Zoi
Alliance for Climate Protection Chief Executive Officer

Labor Day
The thousands of hardworking United Steelworkers in the Northwest who lost their jobs didn’t know climate change was their adversary.
Before 2000, 40 percent of the aluminum made in the United States was smelted in Washington, Oregon and Montana. At the time, more than 5,000 USW members worked in eight regional smelters. Low-cost power from the Columbia River hydroelectric system made these smelters cost competitive in the global economy.
But several years of increasingly diminished snow falls in the Cascade Mountains meant less water in rivers and smaller reservoirs, reducing the supply of inexpensive hydroelectricity. Combined with Enron’s infamous energy market manipulations, higher electricity rates caused the permanent closure of a number of these smelters. Today, only three smelters remain in the Northwest, and over 4,500 USW members lost their jobs because of this change in the regional climate, a consequence of the global warming already taking place.

Economic outlook
On Labor Day, the outlook for American workers remains cloudy. Aweakened economy and high energy prices are making it harder for middle class men, women and families to make ends meet.Americans deserve an affordable and stable economic future, and we can get there by pursuing a comprehensive and long-term approach that creates good jobs here in the United States, increases our energy security, and reduces our reliance on harmful fossil fuels. Repowering America with 100 percent clean electricity over the next decade is the way for us to do that.
Pennsylvania has been leading the way, proving that we can create good, permanent jobs that improve the environment. The state recently passed a law requiring energy from renewable sources, a law the United Steelworkers supported. Gamesa Wind, knowing there was a certain demand for the turbines and blades for wind-generating equipment, opened a plant on the site of a closed steel mill in Fairless, Pennsylvania.

Gamesa

Gamesa now employs 1,100 United Steelworkers – sheet metal workers, machinists, electrical equipment assemblers, construction equipment operators, industrial truck drivers – helping to produce renewable energy. What Pennsylvania has started can be expanded with a new, nationwide target and a timetable commensurate with economic and energy challenges the country now faces.
Such a bold target will support a comprehensive national upgrade in energy efficiency that will reduce the energy bills of homeowners and businesses even as fuel costs are on the rise. We will expand the use of existing clean technologies – wind, solar, and geothermal – stimulating construction of dozens of new clean power plants. And we must create a system that delivers power economically from where it is generated to where people live with a unified national grid. Achieving these goals will deliver the jobs that our economy needs – jobs that can’t outsourced, jobs that reassert America’s commitment to opportunity, innovation and environmental protection for all. This is what it means to Repower America.

By Holly Hart
USW Legislative Director

Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, on his 72^nd birthday, announced a selection that revealed the depths of his cynicism and the shallowness of his judgment – and his disregard for women’s intelligence.

After looking into a pool of vice president candidates deep with qualification, he plucked out the least experienced person.

This follows four months in which he and his surrogates continually blathered that Democratic nominee Barack Obama was unqualified. Former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani just got done giving that GOP talking point to TV commentators during the Democratic Convention, contending repeatedly that Sen. Obama’s credentials made him unfit to be commander-in-chief – an accusation Sen. Obama effectively refuted in his nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.

That speech was so effective, the McCain campaign had to do something – anything – to steal the spotlight away from a defining moment in American history.

The very next day the McCain campaign played their trump card – McCain announced that he’d selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate.

Although a dedicated public servant, wife and mother, here’s the sum total of Palin’s experience: not quite two years as governor; two terms as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, population, 8,000; two terms on Wasilla city council; chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission; TV sports reporter; small business owner for three years; mother of five; bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the University of Idaho, and Miss Alaska runner-up.

If McCain, who has suffered melanoma, were elected, Palin would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Palin’s competition for the VP slot included Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Every one of them has at least one advanced degree; Romney has two, both from Harvard. Every one has substantially more years of experience in governing than Palin.

The least experienced might be Pawlenty. But even he has, in addition to that city council experience, a dozen years in the state legislature. And he’s serving his second term as governor, not his second year.

With Palin at his side, McCain now is open for the same ridicule he’s heaped on Obama. And the reason he opened himself up for that mock-fest is clear: He believes women are stupid.

Put a woman on the ticket, he cynically figured, and he’d garner disgruntled supporters of unsuccessful Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The strategy of selecting Palin shows he believes women, who supported Sen. Clinton, an abortion rights advocate, are so Stepfordesque that they’ll just follow the Republican ticket now that there’s a woman attached to it.

Palin, unlike Sen. Clinton, is anti-choice. She is a member of an anti-abortion group called Feminists for Life. In 2002, when she ran for lieutenant governor in Alaska, she sent an e-mail to the anti-abortion Alaska Right to Life Board saying she has “adamantly supported our cause since I first understood, as a child, the atrocity of abortion.”

She’s a member of the National Rifle Association and backs drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (McCain picked her, though he does not support drilling there.)

But McCain doesn’t think Clinton’s supporters will notice any of that.  He figures they’ll blindly accept any female – whether she has a strong record on the issues that affect working families or not.  There is no doubt that Palin’s a successful woman.  But what we know of her record does not qualify her to be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  McCain has so little respect for women’s intelligence that he thinks we will make a choice based solely on gender.

When Obama was in the process of vetting vice presidential candidates, he told reporters he couldn’t make a hasty decision. The reason, he said, was the selection of a running mate was “the most important decision that I will make before I am president.”

In choosing Palin, McCain has clearly shown he lacks the judgment to be president. In this most important decision, he made his choice based on cynicism and politics instead of choosing a leader qualified to govern this country should something dreadful befall the president.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

View of middle class
The most fundamental difference in how Democrats and Republicans view middle class Americans revealed itself inadvertently in speeches during the second night of the convention in Denver.
The keynote speaker, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, started it, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, kept it up –  that talk of the future. Future this, future that.
“This race is all about the future,” Warner said.
“This is a fight for the future,” Clinton said.
Then they spoke of how they believe middle class Americans are capable of making that future great, of meeting any challenge, in science, in commerce, in battle.
“We need leaders once again who can tap into that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges, leaders who can help us show ourselves and the world that, with our ingenuity, creativity and innovative spirit, there are no limits to what is possible in America,” Clinton told a roaring crowd.

Stark contrast

This stands in stark contrast with the Republican view of the middle class as extolled by their beloved Ronald Reagan and embraced by the party since, including presumptive Republican nominee John McCain who refers to Reagan with a certain slathering hero worship. Under Royal Reagan economic policy, government assists Republicans in amassing fortunes.
And, theoretically, any leftovers trickle down on the middle class. In other words, the middle class is something to be trickled on.
Since the Reagan administration, the rich did, in fact, get richer in this country, but trickle down hasn’t worked so well for the middle class. Especially in the past eight years. Between 2000 and 2007, median income for working age households fell $2,176. During the Bush Administration, an additional 7.2 million Americans became uninsured. Unemployment, inflation and foreclosures are all rising at alarming rates.
Yet, John McCain, a man whose wealth is estimated at $100 million, had this to say in April about economic progress since Bush took office:  “I think if you look at the overall record and millions of jobs have been created… you can make an argument that there’s been great progress economically over that period of time.” McCain also contended that a lot of economic problems were “psychological” and that the “fundamentals of this economy are strong.”

Never middle class

That view of the middle class illustrates disdain. And maybe that’s because it comes from people who never lived a middle class life – think Bush – never wanted to – think McCain – and never sympathized or even empathized with it.
That is certainly not true of the Democrats running for president. The vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden, came from a working class family and remains one of the poorest members of the Senate. And Sen. Barack Obama was raised by a single mother who, at times, was forced to rely on food stamps.
They know what it is to struggle. They know what it is to overcome. As a result, they believe we all can do it.
And that is what Clinton and Warner were talking about – that basic belief in the power of the middle class to seize the future – if given true opportunity and inspiration by their leaders in government.
The Democrats chose Warner, who founded a high-tech firm, the company that would become Nextel, before entering politics, to be their keynote speaker. The party whose candidate announced his vice president by text message went with someone who spent his career looking forward.

Progress never easy

Both Warner and Clinton said resolving the difficult problems left behind by the Bush administration won’t be easy. “Progress never is,” Clinton said.
But, she warned, progress won’t be made by trying to use the same tired old fixes, like off shore drilling, to solve our problems. That’s a McSame solution, she said.
It is nothing but a reach back to the past from a 71-year old politician who admits he never bothered to learn how to use the internet: McCain.
The promise of Obama is a future that contains both renewable energy and the green jobs that it creates, Clinton pointed out. Those are jobs that struggling middle class families could use in these tough economic times. Democrats understand that.
The difference between Obama and McCain is the difference between hope for the future and continuing to be trickled on.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Public service
The Democratic Party paid homage at its convention Monday night to a Kennedy scion whose family values demand public service and who believed it was his duty as a senator to speak for the voiceless, not champion the causes of the already powerful.
The film clip played for the delegates showed Ted Kennedy, who is fighting for his life after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, on a sailboat, explaining his favorite pastime and his relationship with the sea.
This son of wealth could have done nothing more with his life than sail. But he descended from a family that gave so much to this country – a son in World War II, two more to assassination – that he was compelled to perform for all of their names.
His service has always been to the basic values of the Democratic Party, that the American Dream should be for everyone, not just a few, not just the privileged, not just the Kennedys. And he has anointed Barack Obama as the successor to that legacy.
Kennedy’s philosophy stands in stark contrast to Reagan-Bush-McCain values. Those Republicans worship the almighty dollar, the amassing of large quantities of dollars, and the claim that sufficient coins will trickle out of the pockets and down the legs of the wealthy to sustain the poor.

Reverse trickle

In fact, however, over the past 30 years, Republicans have put in place government programs that reverse the trickle process. So the way it actually works is that the tax dollars of the many trickle up to make the wealthy wealthier. Just one example: Corporations shortchange their pension plans to make the companies appear more profitable, so the CEOs gets large stock options. When the pensions failed, the workers got less and the taxpayers provided the funds through the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. But the CEOs laughed all the way to the bank.
Lobbyists, paid by corporations and aided by Republicans with their “trickle down” philosophy, have established untold numbers of schemes like this in law to benefit the rich at the expense of the many.
They’ve been so successful that income disparity in this country has widened to the point that the 300,000 wealthiest make more money than the other 150 million wage earners put together. Remember, Republicans even opposed an increase in the minimum wage – the first in nearly a decade – from $5.15 an hour to a measly $7.25 an hour.
There’s no doubt the Kennedys are wealthy. But they’re Democrats. They don’t believe in trickle down. Here’s what Ted Kennedy said Monday night, “This is a season of hope. . .of justice and prosperity for the many, not just for the few.”
He mentioned the decline in health insurance coverage, a problem he has long struggled to resolve. “This is the cause of my life,” he told the delegates. Gridlock must be broken, he said, so every American can have decent quality healthcare as a fundamental right, not a privilege.

Medicare vote

This from a man who left his hospital bed in Massachusetts in July to travel to Washington, D. C. to break a stalemate on stalled Medicare legislation. An earlier balloting had fallen one vote short of passage of the bill to prevent a scheduled 10.6 percent cut to physicians who treat Medicare patients.
Obama was at Kennedy’s side when he entered the Senate for the first time since his brain surgery on June 2.
Taking a different path, McCain did not bother to show up for the vote on the legislation crucial to senior citizens.
A scion as well, McCain is the son and grandson of admirals. He had much to live up to, and after a less-than-distinguished stint at the Naval Academy, served with honor in Vietnam.
Afterward, he returned to the states, where, he concedes to philandering, cheating on a wife who’d cared for their children while he’d been held captive for nearly five years and who, herself, had been terribly injured in a car accident.
While in Hawaii, and still married, John McCain, the “family values” political party’s presumptive nominee, met Cindy Lou Hensley, the beer distribution heiress 17 years his junior who is now his second wife.
Today, John McCain’s wealth equals a Kennedy’s. The McCain-Hensley fortune is estimated at $100 million.

Ferragamo flash

And he likes to flash it. He’s been wearing $520 Ferragamo loafers on the campaign trail – even to a supermarket where he talked about the tough economy — the failing economy brought on this country by eight years of the Bush Administration.
Cindy Lou bought him a private jet to help him get around Arizona when campaigning there because it’s such a big state, and she didn’t want him to have to drive, like a normal person, or anything.
And then there are the McCain homes. None in foreclosure, by the way. Seven in all. Too many for John to count apparently. When asked just how many houses he owned, he hesitated, then told a reporter he’d have an aide count them up and get back with those weighty statistics.
That sort of absentminded elitist air would be one thing, but the real distinction is his philosophy. He believes the rich, like him, should stay rich. And too bad for the middle class, which is supporting that wealth.
This guy espouses Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. He wants to make permanent those tax cuts that the wealthy didn’t ask for and don’t even need –  tax cuts that have significantly worsened the national debt, thus weakening the economy and confidence in Wall Street.
At the same time, John McCain plans to create a new tax – on your middle class health care benefits – if you’re one of those lucky enough to still have them.
Tax cuts for the rich. New taxes for the middle class.
This is not a Kennedy. This is definitely not a man who works, as Caroline Kennedy said at the convention of her uncle, Ted Kennedy, to champion the cause of those left out, the poor, the elderly, those without education.
John McCain is no Ted Kennedy. And because of what he believes, John McCain is not someone the middle class can afford to elect president.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Presidential race
While some want to paint this year’s presidential race in black and white, for middle class America, it’s all about the green.
Greenbacks.
Team colors are clearly visible: The Republicans’ – green and gold. That’s obvious when their nominee, John McCain, is one of the richest men in the Senate. He’s so wealthy that when recently asked by a reporter how many homes he owned, he just couldn’t recall.
Seven, Senator, seven.
When schlepping around Arizona on the campaign trail got tough, his wife surprised him with the gift of a private jet to ease the sojourn. When asked to define wealthy, he said, for him, a guy whose worth has been estimated at $100 million, rich is $5 million.
Team colors for the chosen Democratic candidates, by contrast, are basic red, white and blue. Presumptive nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s boyhood family struggled on food stamps for a time. His chosen vice president, Sen. Joe Biden, grew up in hard scrapple Scranton and his family shared quarters with in-laws during tough times. Biden has long been ranked as one of the least wealthy members of the senate.

Kitchen tables

Biden, long a personal friend of McCain’s, noted the economic difference in his speech in Illinois Saturday after Obama introduced him as his selection for vice president. While many Americans sit down at their kitchen tables to worry over bills, Biden said, John McCain, by contrast, would just have to worry over which of his seven kitchen tables to sit down at – not over an actual bill.
Ah, the frets of the rich. And for them — and himself — John McCain wants to preserve Bush’s tax cuts.
Those tax cuts are a considerable part of the budget deficit, and the budget deficit – along with the trade deficit — is a considerable part of the declining confidence in Wall Street.
The Republicans, George Bush, VP Dick Cheney, and McCain, the self-styled “maverick” who voted with Bush-Cheny 95 percent of the time last year and 100 percent this year, took the budget surplus that Democrat Bill Clinton bequeathed them and converted it into a behemoth debt.

$4 gasoline

They took rising employment and sent it down and a burgeoning housing market sent it to bankruptcy. They took a low consumer price index and bought us the highest rate of wholesale inflation in nearly 30 years – 9.8 percent. Think $4-a-gallon gasoline.
Then, just to smack middle class America in the face, they gave the rich tax breaks. ‘Cause multi-millionaires like John and Cindy McCain, with their seven homes and private plane, need a break today.
Greenbacks. Republicans Bush and Cheney put us here, with McCain agreeing all the way. Electing McSame would result in four more years of greenbacks draining out of our wallets.
Obama and Biden didn’t come from the world of wealth that Bush, Cheney and McCain luxuriate in. They have lived the life and felt the feelings of middle class Americans. They know what it is to pay off college and car loans.

Riding the train

Biden rode a train back and forth from Washington to his district home in Delaware, chatting with conductors, never buying a second home and living in pricey D.C. He crawls on the floor to play with his grandkids.
Obama declined top dollar job offers when he graduated Harvard Law School to return to Chicago to become a civil rights lawyer and organize voter registration drives. When he was campaigning in Pennsylvania earlier this year, he wanted pictures of himself feeding a bottle to a calf at a Penn State University dairy so he would have something interesting to tell his little daughters about in their evening telephone call.
Greenbacks. Obama and Biden will help the middle class keep them in their pockets. Because they understand from firsthand experience how difficult it is to get a few there in the first place.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Kosher abuse
In May, when immigration officials raided the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and hauled out 389 undocumented workers, the news was all about immigration violations, but now the focus is on the employer, Agriprocessors Inc.
That’s because it turns out that while purportedly giving ritual consideration to the animals to be slaughtered, Agriprocessors failed to treat with dignity, or legality, the teenagers, and children, some as young as 13, in its employ. The 57 adolescents, some working 17-hour shifts, six days a week, testified to wielding knives and other dangerous tools prohibited for young workers.
The Agriprocessors incident raises difficult questions in the Jewish community. If meat is denied the kosher label because the animal does not die within seconds of precise slitting, is it kosher when the 13-year-old child who processed it was illegally hired, worked a 17 hour day and was refused overtime pay? What if a 16-year-old undocumented youth, who put in 17-hour shifts, six days a week, leaving no time for anything but work and sleep, said in an affidavit, “I felt like I was a slave?”
These violations happened in Iowa, but they occur elsewhere as well, for a simple reason: the Wal-Mart mentality.

Soulless corporate mindset

We have allowed that soulless, unpatriotic global-corporate mindset to control government policy. As a result, the rich have gotten richer while the middle class has paid the bill and gone bankrupt. The great builder and protector of the middle class, collective bargaining, has been eroded by deliberate corporate actions over the past quarter century. Meanwhile, the national debt has increased; inflation and unemployment are up, and foreclosure signs mar every neighborhood.
Corporate lobbyists secured from compliant politicians so-called free trade agreements that have resulted in the loss of millions of good paying, often unionized manufacturing jobs. Those jobs have gone to third-world countries where investigations have shown workers often labor long, grueling hours and are not even paid their own countries’ minimum wage. Then their products are shipped back to the U.S. to be sold at cheap prices at Wal-Mart by workers who are paid less than a living wage and are denied full-time status and health insurance.
What comes around, goes around in the Wal-Mart world. When uninsured Wal-Mart workers get sick, American taxpayers foot the bill. They pay for coverage through Medicaid, the health insurance plan for the poor. That’s what the Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, banks on. Literally banks on. When American taxpayers step up and pay for half of all Wal-Mart employees’ health care, that certainly helps the Waltons stay among the 25 wealthiest families in the world.
Wal-Mart workers would benefit tremendously from forming a union. Workers who belong to unions earn 30 percent more than nonunion workers, and they are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance. The same goes for those workers at Agriprocessors. If they had a union, it could file grievances over the hiring of children, against unpaid overtime and about unsafe working conditions.
In surveys, more than half of U.S. workers, nearly 60 million, say they would join a union immediately if they could. But they don’t get that opportunity under the current Wal-Mart mentality global-corporate system. The political system has been stacked against collective bargaining. Global corporations hire “union busters” to intimidate, harass and fire workers who try to organize unions. Workers are fired in a quarter of the campaigns where workers try to organize unions at private companies. Even when workers successfully form unions, they can’t get a first contract 44 percent of the time because companies refuse to bargain meaningfully.

Employee Free Choice

There is a solution for this problem. It’s called the Employee Free Choice Act. It would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain. It would allow workers to create unions by collecting signatures from a majority of workers. As it is now, a company can demand an election for a union. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers may have an election if they want one, but the signatures are sufficient in most cases. This puts the workers in control of their union instead of the company.
The Employee Free Choice Act also would increase penalties for companies that intimidate and fire employees trying to form unions. And it would establish mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and the workers cannot agree on a first contract.
The Employee Free Choice Act has bipartisan support in Congress and polls show it is backed by two-thirds of the American public, including Republicans. It passed easily in the House last year, but in the Senate got only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to stop a Republican filibuster.
Fearing the Employee Free Choice Act could win in the Senate if a few more Democrats secure seats there in the fall elections, Wal-Mart took action in recent weeks. Obviously, Wal-Mart fears that Employee Free Choice means less money for the Waltons, and more free choice for its employees.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Wal-Mart executives began indoctrinating thousands of store managers and department heads about what the company claims are the evils of unionization in an attempt to get them to vote Republican. These managers told reporters that the executives informed them that workers would be forced to pay large amounts of union dues and get nothing in return and be obliged to go on strike and get no compensation.

Contracts like CEOs

Apparently the nation’s largest private employer failed to mention that a portion of union dues goes into a strike fund to provide money for workers who vote to strike. In addition, what workers get for union dues is a contract, guaranteeing them certain salaries and benefits – like the contracts CEOs demand when they are hired by boards of directors.
All of this from a company that flies rapid response teams out to any of its more than 5,000 Wal-Mart stores worldwide to quash brewing union activity.
Global corporations like Wal-Mart have hired the likes of Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and Employee Freedom Action Committee, run by former tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman, to blockade the Employee Free Choice Act. They are trying to make big business out to be David in this David and Goliath struggle, although it is union membership that has shrunk to David size over the past half century. Since its height in 1953, when 35 percent of workers belonged to unions, membership has now fallen to 12.1 percent.
A big part of the reason for that is constant harassment by big business. Let’s go back to Agriprocessors. Three years ago, Human Rights Watch investigated working conditions in the meatpacking business and found, among other things, that companies often use illegal tactics to crush union organizing efforts. The report, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” says that when workers tried to defend themselves against harsh working conditions by forming unions, employers used fear and intimidation to stop them. “U.S. law does little to protect workers who try to organize. Enforcement efforts drag on for years, and even decisions that favor workers are usually too little, too late,” report author Lance Compa wrote.
He offered this example: At the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., management fired union supporters, threatened plant closure, stationed police at plant gates to intimidate workers and orchestrated an assault on union activists. When the National Labor Relations Board ordered a new election, Smithfield immediately appealed. In 2000, Smithfield created a company security force that under North Carolina law had public police powers. In 2003, it used trumped-up charges, Compa said, to arrest workers who were active union supporters.

Human rights

The meatpacking industry chooses to use undocumented workers, Human Watch found, because they are easily intimidated. As in Agriprocessor, immigration officials will swoop in and take away a large chunk of a meat packing work force at the drop of a quarter in a pay phone. Human Rights Watch found that some employers use this ability as a threat against undocumented workers who are trying to organize unions.
In addition, what employers like Smithfield and Agriprocessor have up their sleeve is a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying that undocumented workers who are illegally fired for union organizing are not entitled to back pay for lost wages.
Despite all of Wal-Mart’s money and conniving, on rare occasions, a union organizing effort wins. And then, the global giant responds by shutting them down.
In 2000, when the United Food and Commercial Workers finally organized a small number of butchers in East Texas, Wal-Mart immediately phased out butchers at all of its stores and stocked prepackaged meat. Similarly, when a store in Canada voted to unionize, Wal-Mart closed the whole store, contending it had been unprofitable.
This really comes down to a moral issue, just like it does for Jews who question whether meat processed by child laborers in abusive, illegal conditions is really kosher. The question for this country is whether it is moral to allow continued rule by Wal-Mart mentality, with its cheap imported wares of dubious safety manufactured under questionable conditions in foreign countries, then imported and sold in stores by American workers paid less than a living wage and denied health care and the right to organize a union.
Restoring workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively would protect them against the kinds of abuses alleged Agriprocessors. And it would begin to rebuild America’s great middle class as well as re-establish one of our country’s fundamental liberties: the right of free association.

By Leo W. Gerard

International President

Lies, traderous lies and statistics

In the free for all Twenty-First Century, it all sounds terrific – free markets, free trade and free commerce. But really, it’s lies, traderous lies and statistics.

The d in trader is deliberate. This is about the sleight of hand billed as free trade.

We’re constantly told it’s a win-win. In 2000, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, for example, a former president said that exports to China already supported hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and this figure would grow substantially with the new access to Chinese markets that the WTO agreement would create. Politicians also promised the U.S. would benefit from exports to the rapidly growing consumer market in China.

The opposite, however, has occurred: China has exploited the U.S. consumer market while U.S. companies have been restricted to selling to China bulk goods such as grains, scrap, and chemicals, some intermediate products such as semiconductors and some durable products such as aircraft.

The China trade promises were snake oil.

The Economic Policy Institute released a study Wednesday revealing what happened to American jobs since China was admitted to the WTO. Between 2001 and 2007, 2.3 million workers lost their jobs or were displaced because of trade deficits with China.

Annual earnings lower

Annual earnings for all U.S. workers without a college degree are $1,400 lower because of competition with China’s low-wage workers and because China now accounts for such a huge percent of all of our imports. Displaced American workers, who did find new jobs, lost an average of $8,146 a year in earnings each. That is $156 less each week to use to feed the kids, to pay the mortgage, to meet the car payments.

Coincidentally, on the very same day EPI released its report, talks in Geneva, Switzerland to open global markets even further collapsed as China and India refused to allow free trade when it came to their own agricultural products. Both countries wanted to impose or raise tariffs on imported agricultural goods to protect their indigenous farmers.

Remember, it is for the most part, bulk goods, such as agricultural products, that the U.S. is exporting to China. A sticking point in the negotiations, for example, was soybeans. U.S. trade representative Susan C. Schwab had agreed that China could increase tariffs on soybeans in 8 of every 10 years, and still China walked away from the Geneva talks.

So here is the question: how can this relationship possibly be called free trade when China wanted to impose tariffs on our soybeans in 8 of 10 years, when it is manipulating its currency, when it is subsidizing its manufacturing, when it is failing to enforce even the most basic environmental and labor regulations?

That is snake oil.

We need fair trade. And so do Chinese workers and families, who are being abused by this so-called free trade system that benefits only CEOs and major shareholders of global corporations.

Unfair trade kills

What do Americans workers and families get out of so called free trade? A report, “The Toxic Truth: Unfair Trade Kills” issued recently by the United Steelworkers details the gross destruction, including a four-year-old who died after swallowing a lead pendant that was attached to his shoe imported from China; two Philadelphia carpenters killed when their van crashed while they were traveling home from work on defective tires manufactured in China, and 81 patients from across the country poisoned by contaminated heparin, a blood thinner imported from China.

In addition, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission recalled 30 million toys made in China last year because they were doused with dangerous leaded paint; Chinese-made pet food sickened and killed untold numbers of American cats and dogs because it contained tainted wheat protein; officials pulled off the market poisonous Chinese toothpaste; children were sickened by Aqua Dots toy kits made in China with a substitute chemical that turned into the “date rape” drug when swallowed, and the U.S. blocked import of Chinese fish containing banned antibiotics.

That’s just the consumer viewpoint. The EPI study dispelled the myth that a good education is insurance against job displacement. EPI found that 31 percent of the jobs lost since China entered the WTO were among workers with college degrees and more than half – 55.6 percent — of the displaced were in the top half of American wage earners. The China trade deficits have contributed to the loss of 200,000 scientist and engineer jobs within this nation’s manufacturing base, a 10.7 percent drop.

This is what free trade has given the U.S. Poisonous products. Lost jobs. Lower earning power.

It’s not just us though. Think about this: One effect of free trade is polluted air wafting all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the shores of California, a state that enforces environmental standards higher than the national ones. Twenty-five percent of the pollutants in the Los Angeles basin come from China. That’s tragic for Californians who try so hard.

Tragic for China too

That’s also tragic for the Chinese people who live with befouled air every day. (Well, except during the brief period of the Olympic Games when the country is attempting to impress the world. After that, the cars, trucks and industrial pollution will return full force.) More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water – often because of untreated pollution pouring into them from factories.

An investigative report issued earlier this month by the National Labor Committee describes conditions in the Kai Da Toy factory in Shenzhen, China where the Sesame Street’s Kid K’Nex Ernie construction toys are made. In violation of local and national laws, the factory’s employees are forced to work 13 to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week without health care. After deductions for room and board, they are paid 28 cents an hour, far below the requisite minimum wage. The 600 workers include 100 16-year-olds, and earlier this year, included numerous children who “disappeared” after an investigation by a Chinese newspaper.

NLC inquiries have repeatedly uncovered violations of Chinese labor law. Chinese firms don’t have to pay U.S. minimum wage. But they need to follow their own rules and not make virtual slaves of their country’s own adolescents.

Adult American factory workers trying to support families cannot compete with Chinese teenagers living four to a dormitory room on the factory site without any health or other benefits, working sweatshop hours, seven days a week.

What kind of “free trade” system is this? Those Chinese adolescents aren’t free. The American factory workers who have lost their jobs have forfeited financial freedom.

Still, the Kai Da factory will make big money. And the American corporations selling the Ernie construction toys will make big profits. Free trade works just fine for them.

If so-called free trade is ever to be replaced with fair trade, workers and families in China and America and every other trading country must demand it. Fair trade means that at the very least, labor and environmental regulations must be respected and enforced, so that people are not enslaved and the environment destroyed in the name of global corporate profit.

Really, at some point, when politicians claim these free trade deals are a win-win, and the actual result is 16-year-old Chinese youngsters working 16 hour days and American workers idled while their youngsters play with toxic imported toys, aren’t the lies traitorous?