As dozens of Congressional freshmen took their oaths of office Wednesday, the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) sought help in holding them to their campaign promises to support manufacturing in America and fair trade.
During AAM’s “Keep it Made in America” Town Hall tour that coincided with the fall election cycle, many of the new members of Congress talked a good game about saving U.S. manufacturing. They pledged support for Buy America requirements and for holding China accountable for violating international trade rules and agreements.
AAM produced this video in its effort to ensure that politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who pledged support for manufacturing on the campaign fulfill that promise now that they’ve been sworn into office.
Too many American are unemployed. But Congress is not likely to act in any meaningful way to boost the economy. The Federal Reserve is trying quantitative easing, but that may not be a panacea.
That’s why it is time to take matters into your own hands…and your wallets. This holiday shopping season: Buy American. It’s your own personal stimulus plan for our economy.
Buying American is easier than you might think. Localization is in. And, products from golf balls to pool noodles are still made in America. There are plenty of domestically manufactured toys, clothes, and sporting goods to satisfy even the most discriminating of shoppers. American-made goods offer a proven safety record, compared to the frequent incidents of tainted products imported from China.
Before you buy those holiday gifts, look at the label and consider the options. We have dozens of gift ideas on our ManufactureThis blog, and we’ll be offering new options for you to consider every day.
When you buy an American-made toy, you’re not only helping to employ a U.S. factory worker, but you’re also choosing a safe option. There are many, many instances of toxic and lead-painted goods from China. Our children’s health isn’t worth the risk. (more…)
The women of AAM joined the United Steelworker (USW) Women of Steel for the 2010 World of Women International conference, held in Pittsburgh this week and coordinated by USW Women of Steel Director Ann Flener.
Over 1,000 women from several countries converged on the convention center for a three-day retreat to learn about workers’ rights, politics, trade and leadership. While the majority of attendees were from the United Steelworkers in the United States and Canada, there were several women in attendance from the UK and Ireland representing Workers Uniting; from Mexico representing Los Mineros, and from Liberia representing the forestry union and Liberian Labor Congress.
A memorable speaker on Monday was Napoleon Gomez and his wife Oralia, who joined by teleconference from Canada. The Los Mineros labor leader from Mexico has been living in exile in Canada for four years with his life being threatened by mining giant Grupo Mexico for working to address workplace and human rights in his home country. Gomez explained, “this is not a story of science fiction. This is a story of real violations of labor and human rights. We need to work together in solidarity and my friends the United Steelworkers understand solidarity.”
Canadian Steelworker Carol Landry, the first woman elected as international vice president in the USW, also spoke Monday, reassuring the group, primarily women, not to give up hope. “I have one message for you to take home: There is a place for women in our great union…and there is always a sister that needs you to reach back and bring her along.”
Monday ended with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi addressing the group and saluting the work Women of Steel committees do all over the country to reach out into communities. Pelosi talked about the specifics of the health care bill in regards to women by explaining, “no longer will being a woman be considered a pre-existing condition.”
USW International President Leo Gerard recognized the importance of conference attendees to the future of the union and activism and praised them by saying, “as union activists, when you get up in the morning today, tomorrow, and the next day, you get a chance to stand up and make someone else’s life better. I can’t think of a better thing to do in life and I’m humbled to be the president of this fine union.”
By Rachel Bennett Steury
Field Coordinator, Alliance for American Manufacturing
Women of AAM, Rachel Bennett Steury top left
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This piece is re-published from the Alliance For American Manufacturing blog, ManufactureThis.
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Last week, I was in Jackson Michigan to attend the 2010 “Keep It Made In America” Town Hall Tour meeting. It was a very well-attended event, and everyone I spoke with seemed energized because someone is out there talking about what they consider an important issue, and thought that manufacturing is vitally important to the country, for jobs, and so we can pay our bills.
I last visited Jackson three years ago. The downtown was dreary, and I remember walking around trying to find a place to buy a sandwich, giving up and ending up at a dreary fast-food place outside of town. Like Flint, things appear to be changing. In Flint is has been public/private government/business partnerships that has helped revive the downtown and the area. The University of Michigan has opened a Flint campus right downtown and you can feel the difference. I’m moving fast on this road trip so I didn’t have time to investigate what is behind the different feeling in Jackson. But I had trouble getting to flint because I kept passing all these highway construction zones with ARRA (stimulus) signs. The official U-3 unemployment rate is down to 12.8% from 15.2 earlier this year.
The Town Hall
The meeting was in the Commonwealth Community Center, downtown. The large room was full, approx 275-300 attendees. I asked around and things were getting started and people were getting seated and it was a diverse audience politically, including some Tea Party supporters. Everyone I spoke with seemed energized because someone is out there talking about what they consider an important issue, and thought that manufacturing is vitally important to the country, for jobs, and so we can pay our bills. A recent poll found that 74% of tea party supporters want government strategy for manufacturing. (more…)
By Scott Paul
Executive Director, Alliance for American Manufacturing
All praise from here for President Obama’s courageous decision Friday to proceed with an investigation of China’s opportunistic and illegal trade practices in the clean energy sector. Those of us dedicated to supporting U.S. workers, U.S. jobs and U.S. manufacturing owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.
The Administration deserves a tremendous amount of credit for considering this case on its merits, rather than letting some overarching philosophy dictate the outcome. Demonstrating a willingness to challenge China’s cheating could make a huge difference for American workers and businesses in the clean energy manufacturing sector. And if the Administration’s efforts with China are successful, the ultimate result will be more American jobs.
Friday’s decision, announced by United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk, was in response to a United Steelworkers (USW) Section 301 unfair trade complaint against China. In his announcement, Kirk said, “We take the USW’s claims very seriously, and we are vigorously investigating them.” He said his office would use the next 90 days – the time period called for under World Trade Organization (WTO) laws – to investigate the practices detailed in the USW petition.
The Steelworkers – one of our stakeholders – stepped up to the plate while many others have been reluctant to do so in the face of Chinese pressure. Here was the union’s reaction Friday.
This week’s trade numbers sure helped drive home the fact of the absurdity of our trading relationship with China: a record-breaking $28 billion trade deficit with China driving a total August deficit of $46.3 billion.
China did not get to this superior position by playing on a level playing field, and the USW’s petition, a 5,800 page report, details the more than 80 Chinese laws, regulations and practices that are designed to crush clean energy manufacturing and other green technology in the U.S. As the August numbers help show, China’s plan is working. China has set prices to undercut the U.S. and other competitors, set discriminatory technology laws and regulations, demanded that foreign companies transfer valuable technology, and has provided massive subsidies to Chinese companies, causing serious damage to U.S. interests. (more…)
Posted
September 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm,
in
From the News
Mike Elk
By Mike Elk
Labor Journalist
Almost a year ago, President Obama imposed tariffs on Chinese tire Imports. Between 2004 and 2008, Chinese tires imported to the U.S. at below-market prices increased by more than 300%. The resulting illegal dumping of Chinese tires resulted in the loss of 8,000 tire workers jobs in the United States.
A new study by the Alliance for American Manufacturing has shown that Obama’s enforcement of the trade laws has actually led to an increase in employment and tire production. The study, based on Rubber Manufacturing Association data, shows that U.S. tire factory production has gone up over 15 percent, or by more than 10 million tires. Nearly 500 new workers have been hired in the tire industry and overtime has gone up at Goodyear plants by 20% and at Michelin plants by 15%.
“There is a simple lesson here. Enforcing trade laws works” said Alliance for American Manufacturing Director Scott Paul, in a statement responding to critics who said the tire tariffs wouldn’t help the American economy.
Last year, the United Steelworkers filed a legal case with the International Trade Comission (ITC) under Section 421 calling on the United States government to remedy the situation in accordance with World Trade Organization rules by placing tariffs on the tires. The ITC ruled by a 4-2 vote that the Chinese had created an illegal “market disruption” and recomended tarrifs to remedy the situation. In the decade since the Section 421 law had been in effect, the ITC had ruled seven times that tariffs should be placed on a foreign country to remedy an illegal “market disruption.” On each of those seven occasions, President George W. Bush refused to enforce to enforce the recommendations of the International Trade Commission. (more…)
Posted
August 28, 2010 at 9:23 pm,
in
From AFL-CIO
James Parks
By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer
Unlike our nation’s economic competitors, such as China and Germany, which have national policies geared to increasing their economic development, the United States does not. While we admonish such countries to consume more and export less, they are figuring out ways to increase exports and consume less—and, in turn, are growing their economies far faster than the United States.
In a recent letter to President Obama, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and a group of bipartisan senators wrote that the key to turning our economy around and creating good new jobs is a national industrial policy that would emphasize long-range actions to rebuild our manufacturing base, which has been decimated over the past few decades. In short, they urged the adoption of a national manufacturing policy.
The loss of manufacturing plants and jobs has stifled economic opportunity for middle-class families and compromised our ability to compete in the 21st century economy. Indeed, for the last several decades, administrations have passed up critical opportunities to formulate a rational and comprehensive manufacturing policy. Continued apathy will undermine our country’s ability to achieve energy independence and place our military readiness at risk.
One-third of American manufacturing plants have shut down in the past 10 years, and today only 1,000 U.S. factories employ more than 1,000 workers, according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM). And we are losing high-tech workers at a faster rate than traditional manufacturing jobs, AAM says.
An emphasis on manufacturing is not only good policy, it’s popular. In a recent poll by Mark Mellman and Whit Ayers, 86 percent of the respondents say they back increased government support for manufacturing. A whopping 95 percent believe Congress and the president should spend more time creating jobs, and 85 percent believe they should focus on creating manufacturing jobs. (more…)
Rosie the Riveter defiantly rolls up her blue work shirt to show off a brawny bicep. She’s a symbol of American strength.
She worked in a manufacturing job, one of millions that constructed the defense machine that won World War II for the Allies. She said, “We can do it.” And America did.
Now, however, shuttered U.S. factories and off-shored manufacturing are sapping American strength. The nation has lost more than 40,000 manufacturing plants and one-third of its manufacturing jobs, nearly six million, over the past dozen years. China is on the verge of overtaking the U.S. in manufacturing output. And Americans know it. Late in April, 58 percent of 1,000 likely voters told pollsters they believed America’s economy no longer led the world.
They also told pollsters they supported enacting a national manufacturing policy to promote resurgence of domestic production — a return to the days of a robust Rosie the Riveter and a country that could secure its independence with dynamic manufacturing capability.
Democrats in Congress heard that message. They’ve created a program called “Make It in America.” They plan to pass a series of bills to create an environment in which both Americans and American manufacturers make it. “We want everybody to make it in America,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as she described the plan to 2,000 bloggers and progressive activists at Netroots Nation 2010 last week in Las Vegas.
After all the support America has given the financial sector – estimated to total more than $4 trillion – it’s time for Congress to invest in the productive sector, the one that creates jobs, real wealth and American power.
“We must stop the erosion of our manufacturing base, our industrial base, our technological base,” the Speaker told Netroots Nation, “It is a national security issue to do so, if we had no other justification,” she said, adding that there are, of course, plenty of other reasons.
She said the strategy is to pass “one bill after another” supporting American manufacturing. The House started last week with two, one to ease American industries’ access to raw materials and parts and another to improve specialized workforce training.
In addition, Speaker Pelosi said, House leaders want to address currency manipulation – the deliberate undervaluing of currency to make a country’s exports artificially cheap and imports into that country artificially expensive. Currency manipulation by China, for example, is believed by both conservative and liberal economists to be adding as much as 40 cents to every dollar of the cost of U.S. products exported to China and discounting Chinese goods sold in the U.S. by 40 cents on every dollar.
“There is a strong interest in our caucus in holding China accountable for manipulation of currency. That would make a tremendous difference in our trade because currency manipulation is really a subsidy to their exports to America – an unfair advantage,” the Speaker said at Netroots Nation.
Other bills Speaker Pelosi hopes to pass soon include $5 billion in tax credits for domestic manufacturers that produce components for alternative energy and a requirement that foreign manufacturers keep at least one worker stationed in the U.S. so the company can be officially served with court papers. Also, there’s a bill by Illinois Congressman Daniel Lipinski that would require each U.S. president to produce a manufacturing strategy in the second year of office and to review progress annually.
The survey that prompted Democrats to create the “Make It in America” program was commissioned by the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) and conducted by Democratic pollster Mark Mellman and Republican pollster Whit Ayres. They found that likely voters believed creating manufacturing jobs was more important than reducing the federal deficit and more important than cutting government spending.
The survey also showed strong support for policies requiring the government to buy American-made goods. Similarly, it showed the Democrats, Independents and Republicans surveyed felt the quality of products manufactured in American exceeded those made in China, Japan, India and Germany.
Americans now even prefer U.S.-made cars: An Associated Press-GfK Poll in April showed 38 percent of Americans favor U.S. vehicles. Asian brands got 33 percent.
“The things that make us American are the things we make,” it begins.
“This has always been a nation of builders, craftsmen, men and women for whom straight stitches and clean welds were matters of personal pride. They made the skyscrapers and the cotton gins, colt revolvers, Jeep 4-by-4s,” the ad continues.
“These things make us who we are,” the narrator says. Yes. The things Americans make, make the country strong.
To the sound of a sledge hammer pounding a railroad spike, the narrator goes on to describe the reborn Grand Cherokee, “This, our newest son, was imagined, drawn, craved, stamped, hewn and forged here, in America. It is well-made and it is designed to work. This was once a country that made things, beautiful things, and so it is again.”
Well, not quite. Chrysler may make a terrific Grand Cherokee in Michigan. But American manufacturing needs some help. And with unemployment stuck at 9.5 percent, so do the American people. “Make it in America” is that aid. The AAM poll showed 85 percent of those who said the U.S. had lost economic leadership believed America could regain it.
Americans believe we can still do it.
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Make sure Congress acts. Join the One Nation Working Together march on Washington Oct. 2 to demand good jobs, as well as Wall Street and immigration reform.
In the film, “Monte Python and the Holy Grail,” King Arthur severs both of the Black Knight’s arms during a sword fight, but the Black Knight attempts to battle on.
The king admonishes him: “You’ve got no arms left.”
The knight refutes that: “Yes I have.”
“Look,” at the obvious, the king tells him.
“Just a flesh wound,” retorts the knight, who clearly is suffering a state of denial.
Similarly, in the trade clash between China and America, the Asian giant has gravely wounded the United States. China knows it. U.S. voters of all political stripes know it. But too many American politicians, like the Black Knight, are in denial.
Their deliberate blindness, and resulting inaction, has enabled China to continue devaluing its currency, the Renminbi, against the dollar, a practice that makes its exports artificially cheap in U.S. markets and U.S. exports to China wrongfully overpriced. China announced just before the G-20 summit in Toronto that it would allow the value of the Renminbi to float up on world markets – and then permitted the currency that is undervalued by as much as 40 percent against the dollar to rise an underwhelming one half of one percent.
Political inaction also has facilitated China’s flouting of international trade rules forbidding government subsidies to manufacturers. The Chinese subsidies result in falsely low-priced Chinese goods flooding U.S. markets and submerging U.S. manufacturers.
Main Street Americans see the obvious. They said so in a poll conducted late in April by The Mellman Group for the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM). The likely voters – who identified themselves as Republican, Democrat, Tea Party and Independent – said Washington must focus on manufacturing because it is crucial to America’s economic strength. Large majorities said the U.S. should strengthen domestic manufacturing and develop a national manufacturing policy.
Unfortunately, too many politicians who loll in the rarefied world of Washington, D.C. — so far from Main Street, so very far from an actual factory — don’t see it. So they’ve failed to solve the problems.
A report issued this week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) details the trade difficulties encountered by one American industry – paper manufacturers. Its struggles mirror those that have maimed many other U.S. manufacturers, including pipe mills and tire plants.
The report, “No Paper Tiger: Subsidies to China’s Paper Industry from 2002-09,” notes that in 2008, China overtook the United States to become the world’s largest producer of paper and paper products. This score by China is the solid evidence for the gut feeling Americans expressed in the Mellman poll for AAM. A significant majority told the pollsters they believed the U.S. had lost to China the position of world’s strongest economy.
Americans didn’t need a report to spell out for them what their families and neighborhoods had suffered over the past decade. They’d experienced the closing of more than 10 percent of U.S. manufacturing plants in their communities from 2001 to 2009 – a loss of 42,404 factories. In the paper industry alone, 159,000 of their relatives and neighborslost their jobs as paper mills closed or cut production during the seven-year period covered by the “No Paper Tiger” study.
A woman from Los Angeles told the Mellman pollsters that this relentless loss of manufacturing capability enfeebles America: “When you consume more than you produce, you become dependent, and we are consuming more from other countries than producing our own. . .truly we have become weak and in order to strengthen the economy, I think we need to produce more.”
The U.S. will, however, continue to produce less, the “No Paper Tiger” report makes clear, if Washington doesn’t act against predators violating international regulations. The report explains that China’s government granted at least $33 billion in subsidies to paper manufacturers to accomplish the country’s rapid rise to global leader in paper production.
In its central government-controlled economy, China gives paper companies money and breaks, much of which is improper under international trade regulations. For example, some paper companies get “loans” that they don’t have to repay. The government provides tax breaks, artificially low-priced electricity and underpriced raw materials. This explains how Chinese paper companies increased capacity by an average of 26 percent every year since 2004 even as prices for paper fell internationally and costs for raw materials for paper production in China rose steeply.
China’s rule-violating subsidies and deliberate currency devaluation explain the low price of Chinese paper. Labor costs don’t account for it. That’s because labor is such a tiny percentage of the price of paper – in both the U.S. and China. In China, it’s 4 percent of production cost; in the U.S. it’s 8 percent.
By contrast, Chinese paper manufacturers confront expensive problems that the American industry does not. In China, obtaining raw materials for paper making is complicated and costly because the country has among the smallest forestry resources in the world per capita. In addition, the “No Paper Tiger” report says, the Chinese industry is relatively inefficient. In the U.S., the paper industry is highly efficient and has easy access to abundant natural resources.
The U.S., a market economy, simply does not routinely prop up manufacturers the way China does.
The “No Paper Tiger” report says that if nothing changes, U.S. paper manufacturers will continue to lose money, close mills and bleed jobs. The U.S. could be reduced to serving as nothing more than the supplier of raw materials for Chinese paper production, as if America were an undeveloped third world country incapable of manufacturing on its own.
China’s subsidization of its paper manufacturers isn’t unique. It supports many of its industries. Chinese government intervention in the market accounts for a significant portion of the manufacturing loss in America. That loss diminishes American security.
America is losing her arms. Denying it doesn’t help.
The proposition General Motors has presented to the United Auto Workers and American taxpayers in its latest restructuring plan is simple: You must pay for your own execution.
GM, which already took $15.4 billion in bailout money, wants another $11.6 billion and is offering in return this deal: It will close 16 of its American manufacturing plants, terminate 21,000 of its factory workers and double the cars it builds in low-wage Mexico, China and South Korea and ships back to the U.S. to sell.
There it is: GM is demanding that Americans pay to send their own jobs overseas.
In the world where corporate executives live, the one in which boards of directors grant CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses even after companies tank, maybe that’s not a perverse proposition.
But in the world where real Americans live, we’ve had enough of this crap. Decades of foolish tax and other federal policies that encouraged American manufacturing firms to throw Americans out of work and expatriate were bad enough. To expect American taxpayers to bankroll GM’s plans to layoff American workers and move their jobs overseas goes too far.
We’re taking a stand. It’s gotta stop here. The United Steelworkers (USW), the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) and the Mayors and Municipalities Automotive Coalition (MMAC) are conducting an 11-state, 32-city protest bus tour. At each stop so far, hundreds of people have cheered our message: “Keep it Made in America.” And they’ve signed our petition calling for support of a simple idea: Buy it here; build it here. We will present the petitions at a teach-in conference in Washington, D.C. on May 19 when we will explain to elected officials why GM’s plan fails America and why they must require GM to submit a new plan supporting American jobs.
As much as for the UAW, this is a life and death struggle for the USW, American manufacturing, and for millions of Americans in good-paying jobs. Without manufacturing, America is in danger of attempting to subsist on an economy based on nothing more than amorphous derivatives, credit default swaps and Ponzi schemes. The Steelworkers represent hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs depend on the auto industry, from steelworkers who make the steel, to the rubber workers who make the tires, to the glass workers who make the windshields, to the paper workers who make the glossy pamphlets.
Altogether, more than 7 million paychecks depend on the U.S. auto industry, including healthcare, education, service, retail and other jobs. This bus tour is about preserving those jobs, all of those jobs.
In just the past eight months of this recession, caused in huge part by recklessness on Wall Street, this country has lost 1.2 million manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. GM cannot take tax dollars to slash more. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich agrees. Here’s what he told the Washington Post, “. . . it raises fundamental questions about the purpose of bailing out these big companies. If GM is going to do more of its production overseas, then why exactly are we saving GM?”
It’s not as if it’s impossible for a U.S. auto company to manufacture here. Ford Motor Co., which is not taking any bailout money, is investing $500 million in retooling its Michigan Truck plant outside Detroit so that it can make small cars that it will sell worldwide, including its next-generation, battery-electric Focus. And Chrysler, which is getting bailout money, has made a deal with Fiat under which the Italian car company will manufacture a small car in one of Chrysler’s U.S. assembly facilities, which, along with other long-term commitments, will eventually create 4,000 U.S. jobs.
On the first day of the bus tour, I was joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, actor Danny Glover, the angriest mayor in the U.S., Virg Bernero of Lansing, and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, among others.
The Rev. Jackson drew cheers as he remarked that somehow we’ve given billions to the “banksters,” yet somehow we’re still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs and homes each month. He called for a moratorium on foreclosures and plant closings, and I’m with him.
Bernero is tired of Wall Street describing his father, a retired auto worker, as a legacy cost. His father is a human being, a senior citizen, who worked hard every day of his life and returned home exhausted from an honest day’s work. Now, however, Wall Street thinks it’s fine to reduce him to a sub-human term and cheat him out of the retirement benefits he earned.
Bernero’s father made things, real things that could be touched, held in the hand – not derivatives, not figments of the imagination that turned out to have less than no value at all.
Now Wall Street and GM must be made to understand that Main Street isn’t going to take it anymore. We’re not going to continue allowing corporate America to outsource the American dream. Bernero said it right: “This is America’s fight.”
Join us. Sign the petition. We have no intention of buying our own noose. We intend to win this fight.
