Search Results for 'exporting'
Economy, Legislation & Politics |
Oct 27 |
Showdown in Chicago: Thousands Protest Bankers
UPDATE: Check out photos and a video from today’s rally.
More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don’t go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry’s greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual—with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who is joining union members and allies at today’s events, has a clear message to bankers: You work for us.
Economy |
Aug 29 |
‘The Last Truck’: HBO Looks at Plant Closing Through Workers’ Eyes
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Just two days before Christmas 2008, workers at the General Motors assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, watched their livelihood and the lifeblood of their town dry up as their plant shut its doors for good. A new HBO documentary, “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which first airs on Labor Day, offers poignant personal testimony about the impact of the decline of American auto manufacturing on this tight-knit Ohio community.
While the layoffs of the 2,500 workers and 200 management staff was bad enough, thousands more of their friends, neighbors and family would lose their jobs as businesses that serviced the plant—suppliers, restaurants, retail stores—were forced to close for lack of business.
In the documentary, “Popeye,” a toolmaker, simply states what the decline of manufacturing means to him and to the American Dream:
My grandson will have a worse life than I had.
HBO’s press release about the documentary points out the real extent of the damage from the closing:
…the GM workers lost much more than jobs, including the pride they share in their work and the camaraderie built through the years. To the natives of Moraine and the greater Dayton area, General Motors wasn’t just a car company—it was the lifeblood of the community.
Legislation & Politics |
Aug 21 |
Bloom in Line for Administration Manufacturing Post
The Obama administration likely will name Ron Bloom, who heads the White House’s auto task force, to help develop policies to revive the U.S. manufacturing industry, according to reports by Bloomberg News.
The administration wants to create a new position to enable the White House to craft a policy that coordinates trade, labor and tax issues. He would report to Lawrence Summers, the president’s top economic adviser.
Short-sighted U.S. economic policies that encouraged companies to move offshore have created a crisis in manufacturing. Since 2001, some 40,000 U.S. manufacturing plants have closed, resulting in the loss of millions of family-supporting jobs. From 2001 to 2007, some 2.3 million jobs were lost just to the huge U.S. trade deficit with China.
Economy |
Jul 27 |
Memo to Leaders Meeting with China: Time for U.S. Policy that Aids Our Economy
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Here in Washington, D.C., President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are taking part in a big-time summit with China. Let’s hope they have substantive discussions on economic policies that aid U.S. workers. Over the past few days, several great pieces on trade and manufacturing have been published that should feed into the discussions of U.S. participants in what is officially called the “sixth Strategic and Economic Dialogue with China.” Here’s a summary.
**U.S. “protectionism” is a myth. There’s an “untold story of protectionism,” say United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard and Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. That is, the set of barriers other governments erect to block American goods and the mercantilist measures they utilize to gain market share in the United States.
These practices range from China’s currency misalignment and massive industrial subsidies to non-tariff barriers in Korea and Japan. All these impediments have been well documented by U.S. trade officials, but the mere act of identifying these practices is now viewed as protectionism, even though taking action to eliminate them would expand world trade, reduce global imbalances and preserve the free market.
Economy, Legislation & Politics |
Jul 15 |
Manufacturing a Better Future for America
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The United States cannot revive its economy without first rebuilding the nation’s manufacturing base, several experts say. While most of us understand how devastating the loss of a plant can be to a community and to the economy, policymakers don’t get it, they add.
During a roundtable discussion yesterday in Washington, D.C., several contributors to a new book, Manufacturing a Better Future for America, spelled out the case for a bold new U.S. industrial policy.
Simply put: For nearly 300 years, the United States invested in producing goods and, as a result, became the richest nation in history. But for the past few decades, policymakers have systematically dismantled our manufacturing base through bad tax policies and short-sighted trade agreements that encourage consumption of cheap foreign imports and provide incentives for U.S.-based companies to export jobs.
Legislation & Politics |
Jun 3 |
Old Economy Doesn’t Work—Time for a New Model
An economy in which the rest of the world produces and America consumes no longer works. The United States must begin to make more of the things we consume. That will require a new vision for our economy and concrete actions to change the core policies that created the current global economic crisis.
Speaking during a workshop at the America’s Future Now conference this morning, several members of a panel on global economic strategy said the key to long-term economic recovery is the creation of a new economic model that emphasizes production and savings, not consumption.
That new vision must include actions to fight the major causes of the collapse of U.S. manufacturing—currency manipulation, trade policies that foster a race to the cheapest sources of labor, tax policies that encourage companies to move offshore and the imbalance of power between workers and employers.
Legislation & Politics |
May 19 |
Keep It Made in America: Our Future Depends On It
The pundits and politicians inside the Washington Beltway don’t get: If the United States continues to send its manufacturing jobs overseas—as General Motors and Chrysler are now proposing—the result will be more low-income U.S. families.
So today, workers, economists, academics and business and union leaders, fresh from the “Keep It Made in America” bus tour through the nation’s heartland, brought that message to the policymakers’ doorstep as part of a teach-in on Capitol Hill.
The 11-day, 34-city bus tour showcased the ripple effect on communities of the lost jobs in manufacturing. (See video.) Today, during the teach-in, those who took part brought the stories they heard along the tour and presented principles for revitalizing the auto industry to members of Congress and the press.
Economy |
Jan 23 |
New Report: 30 Million Service Jobs May Be Shipped Overseas
Recent telecommunications advances, especially the Internet, could theoretically put more than 30 million U.S. jobs at risk of being exported overseas. Services previously needed to be performed domestically theoretically can be done anywhere in the world through the Internet, four U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) analysts say in an article appearing in the agency’s Monthly Labor Review (subscription required).
The 160 occupations considered capable of being performed in other countries account for some 30.3 million workers, one-fifth of total U.S. employment and cover a wide array of job functions, pay rates and educational levels.
Legislation & Politics |
Oct 23 |
Ohio AFL-CIO President Joe Rugola: Obama Is Best Hope for New Economy
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For nearly three weeks, Joe Rugola, Ohio AFL-CIO president, has walked across the state to remind Ohioans not to be distracted by side issues this election season and to focus on the toll of eight years of Bush-McCain economic polices—more than 180,000 Ohio jobs lost and nearly 1,100 plants, factories and other workplaces closed forever.
Yesterday in Jackson, a town of some 6,000 in southern Ohio, Rugola saw firsthand the devastation wrought by a policy that rewards employers who take jobs overseas. Rugola talked with Peggy Nixon, a member of the United Steelworkers who lost her job at Meridian Automotive Systems when the plant shut down last year, putting some 300 workers out of a job. Nixon, who has worked more than 30 years at the plant, says she and her husband live off his disability check and “whatever we can pick up.” (See video.)
We’re just trying to pick up and start all over again. We recycle a lot. I’ve sold more pop cans than I care to mention. If it wasn’t for the union, I don’t know what we would have done.
Legislation & Politics |
Oct 22 |
A Dead Bear, Slashed Tires and More Dirty Election Moves in N.C.
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Across the country, some Republicans are engaging in the tired tactics of personal attacks and attempts to intimidate voters—especially in North Carolina recently.
According to James Andrews, president of the North Carolina State AFL-CIO, dirty tricks are off the scale this election because Sen. Barack Obama’s message about the economy has taken hold in the Tarheel State. Says Andrews:
The Republicans are making every effort to use the same tactics of intimidation, misinformation and outright lies. But they’re not going to trick us. Folks are not going to buy it this time. People have been hurt by the economy. They’re focused and concerned about their jobs and what’s going to happen to their health care and if they can keep their homes. So those distractions they’ve used before won’t work this time.
