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Steelworker Tells China Trade Commission: It’s Time to ‘Stop the Bleeding’ |
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Darryl Jackson knows firsthand how U.S. and Chinese trade policies have impacted at least part of the North Carolina economy.
Jackson, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 959, which represents 1,800 workers at the Goodyear plant in Fayetteville, N.C., says:
”In the last year, we’ve gone from running 65,000 tires a day to 48,000 a day.”
Jackson was one of several witnesses yesterday at a hearing in Chapel Hill by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressionally appointed bipartisan group studying the impact of U.S.-China trade on the Tarheel State.
While most of the daylong hearing was taken up by economists, academics and corporate types speaking of economic trends, employment reallocation and structural adjustment, Jackson brought a worker’s perspective to the hearing. (Click here to read the witnesses’ testimony.
In an interview following the hearing, Jackson said he told the commission the Fayetteville plant produces what are called “low-value-added” tires—the basic 14- to15-inch tires standard on most small and midsize cars.
That is the market Chinese tire manufactures have targeted—with the help of massive government subsidies, extremely low-wages and China’s repression of workers’ human rights and failure to enforce its own weak labor laws, according to recent studies.
Jackson told AFL-CIO Now:
It is going to be impossible to compete with the Chinese as far as low-value-added tires, and if they don’t stop the bleeding, it will continue. It’s so difficult to see brothers and sisters in other plants lose their jobs.
A Goodyear plant in Alabama that made the 14- to 15-inch tires closed in 2003, he said, and Goodyear’s plant in Tyler, Texas, is about to close, too, because of the unfair economic advantage and Chinese tiremakers’ almost unfettered access to U.S. markets.
The jobs lost are just awful. The Tyler, Texas, plant is very productive and a great workforce, but they can’t compete. It has nothing to do with the people in Tyler…What’s going to happen 10 year from now, the Chinese are bound to go after the high-value-added tires.
Jackson stressed to the commission that Chinese manufacturers have another edge that has come to light—lax product safety control. Earlier this year, a New Jersey tire importer announced that 450,000 Chinese-made tires were defective after a set of the tires was linked to a fatal rollover crash. The tires were missing an important safety feature to prevent them from separating. Millions of Chinese-made toys have been recalled recently because of lead content and dangerous parts. Jackson said:
We’re finding out more and more every day. There was poison pet food and the lead in the toys. Who wants to ride on a tire that you’ve got any doubts about when you’re going down the road at 60 miles per hour with your family in the car?
For more on U.S.-China trade policy, click here, here and here.
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American workers are being sold out by our presidents. Jimmy Chong, a felon, financed by the Chinese Peoples Army contributed to Bill Clinton’s campaign. Hsu, a wanted felon and Chinese citzen also contributed along with the PAW family originally from China contributed to the Democrat campaigns. So then Bill Clinton along with Congress gave China a free trade agreement. Bush is trying to give the rest of our jobs to illegal immigrants from all parts of the world. We have to stop the American sellouts and give-aways by our elected representatives.
The Bush WH proposes to fund a railroad to supply Chinese industries with raw materials. See the Mongolian proposal at mcc.gov.
James Baker III & IV went to Mongolia and had secret talks with Mongolian officials. Shortly after the MCC proposal was altered to include the railroad funding.
This railroad has the primary purpose of shipping raw materials such as coal, copper, oil, lumber from Russia and Mongolia to China.
Your tax dollars at work.
The Consumer Product Safety Division has been cut by the Bush administration to one (yes, ONE!) employee. This says a lot about our government. Yes, it is all about politics - crooked, corrupt, self-serving, greedy government officials who are destroying this country in every conceivable way possible.
A recent survey I read about found that American workers are the most productive in the world. So why is it they are not treated with any kind of respect by the very corporations that would rather send the work overseas so they don’t have to pay fair wages; and why is it that our government gives American workers so little credit for everything they continue to do for themselves and this country? And why is it that the American worker does not even deserve to have proper safety procedures in place, or receive a decent, living wage? Things are so messed up.
There has to be some real, significant, positive changes in the way this country is run if we are even going to survive. I am hoping that new leadership will be a good start, but all of us have to do what we can as well to assure that this country can move in a better, more positive, more people-oriented direction.