Steelworker Tells China Trade Commission: It’s Time to ‘Stop the Bleeding’

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/09/07/steelworker-tells-china-trade-commission-its-time-to-stop-the-bleeding/

Steelworker Tells China Trade Commission: It’s Time to ‘Stop the Bleeding’

by Mike Hall, Sep 7, 2007

Darryl Jackson knows firsthand how U.S. and Chinese trade policies have impacted at least part of the North Carolina economy.


Darryl Jackson, president of Steelworkers Local 959

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.

FULL story at link.

[Bitwit1234]

1. I know one area they can't outsource jobs.

The Iron Range in Minnesota has more iron than any place in the world. They can't sending these mining jobs anywhere else. They have to take it out of the ground here in Minnesota.