Trade Deal Layoffs Ahead

Economic Armageddon not far behind

 

US Steel Warns Of Layoffs In Arkansas And Texas As Trans-Pacific Partnership Looms, Posted on April 22, 2015 Written by ibtimes.com

 

United States Steel Cor­po­ra­tion issued lay­off notices to 1,404 work­ers in the lat­est sign of strug­gle for the Amer­i­can steel indus­try. The mis­sives went out in recent days to work­ers pro­duc­ing pipe and tube prod­ucts that are used in the oil and gas sec­tor. Job cuts could come as early as June for 17 to 579 employ­ees at a plant in Lone Star, Texas, 166 at a fac­tory in Hous­ton, 255 at a mill in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and 404 man­agers across the company’s tubu­lar oper­a­tions nationwide.

Since last June, the com­pany has informed 7,800 employ­ees of poten­tial job cuts, a tally from Pitts­burgh Busi­ness Times indi­cated. U.S. Steel spokes­woman Sarah Cas­sella said the ongo­ing lay­offs are the result of “chal­leng­ing mar­ket con­di­tions and global influ­ences in the mar­ket includ­ing a high level of imports, reduced prices for oil and nat­ural gas and reduced steel prices.”

Loom­ing in the dis­tance is the Trans-Pacific Part­ner­ship (TPP), a pro­posed trade agree­ment with 11 other Pacific Rim coun­tries that includes major steel pro­duc­ers like Japan and South Korea, and has the sup­port of the White House. Crit­ics say it could exac­er­bate domes­tic steel’s woes.

In the after­math of the reces­sion, cheaper steel imports, many of them from China and other Asian coun­tries, flooded U.S. mar­kets. From Jan­u­ary 2014 to Jan­u­ary 2015 alone, imports to the United States surged increased by about a third to reach nearly 4 mil­lion met­ric tons. The glut in foreign-produced steel has made it harder for Amer­i­can com­pa­nies like Pittsburgh’s U.S. Steel to com­pete.

Mean­while, the recent decline in oil prices — about 60 per­cent since last June — presents another chal­lenge. As wary domes­tic oil and gas com­pa­nies scale back spend­ing and lay off work­ers, demand for pipe and tube sags.

The recent lay­off announce­ments join a geo­graph­i­cally diverse list of pend­ing job cuts at U.S. Steel. Since March, the com­pany has announced plans to idle tem­porar­ily a mas­sive fac­tory in Gran­ite City, Illi­nois, that employs 2,000 and a tubu­lar steel facil­ity in Ohio that employs 614 in addi­tion to other plants in Penn­syl­va­nia and Min­nesota. U.S. Steel has 23,000 work­ers in North Amer­ica and 12,500 in Europe, fil­ings with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion show.

Added to those con­cerns is the TPP. Last week, a bipar­ti­san group of leg­is­la­tors intro­duced a so-called fast-track bill that would limit Con­gress’ abil­ity to amend the ver­sion of the trade deal approved by negotiators.

Scott Paul, pres­i­dent of the Alliance for Amer­i­can Man­u­fac­tur­ing, said the cur­rent ver­sion of the deal fails to address ade­quately cur­rency manip­u­la­tion — a long-standing con­cern shared by top steel indus­try employ­ers and labor unions in North Amer­ica. Domes­tic steel exec­u­tives voiced sim­i­lar con­cerns at a con­gres­sional hear­ing last month.

Paul said TPP sig­na­tory Japan — the sec­ond largest steel pro­ducer after China — reg­u­larly under­val­ues its cur­rency as a means of arti­fi­cially boost­ing exports, dumps the goods in the U.S. and faces lit­tle con­se­quence: “The way that many of these trade laws are struc­tured, you have to be in the eco­nomic equiv­a­lent of the ICU before you can peti­tion for relief and expect it to be successful.”

Sup­port­ers have lauded the TPP as a “21st cen­tury trade agree­ment” that sets “high-standard” rules for future trade deals. By the same token, if the TPP locks in low stan­dards on cur­rency manip­u­la­tion and pro­vides insuf­fi­cient means to chal­lenge coun­tries on such grounds, the trade deal would help cement what’s already an uneven play­ing field for domes­tic steel pro­duc­ers and work­ers, Paul said. In other words, that could mean more low-cost imports from Japan and South Korea — not to men­tion Malaysia and Viet­nam, which are also part of negotiations.

Paul wor­ries the TPP doesn’t include suf­fi­ciently rig­or­ous “rules of ori­gin,” which deter­mine how much domes­ti­cally pro­duced con­tent some­thing must have before it can ben­e­fit from the trade deal. In other words, a South Korean refrig­er­a­tor or a Japan­ese car made from Chi­nese steel could, in the­ory, could enjoy the pro­tec­tions and ben­e­fits of the TPP even though China is not part of the agree­ment. Paving the way for more inex­pen­sive Chi­nese steel to enter U.S. mar­kets can only hurt domes­tic pro­duc­ers, he said. (The full text of the agree­ment has not yet been made pub­lic, so the specifics of the rules of ori­gin sec­tion remain unclear.)

So long as the TPP does not address those con­cerns — and the deal, at the moment, does not appear to do so — it will have a “neg­a­tive effect on the steel indus­try,” Paul said.

The United Steel­work­ers union, which rep­re­sents most of the North Amer­i­can labor force at U.S. Steel in addi­tion to work­ers in other man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tors, has helped lead the oppo­si­tion to fast-track leg­is­la­tion. More than 1,000 activists from envi­ron­men­tal groups and orga­nized labor ral­lied against the bill on Capi­tol Hill Monday.

Iron and steel work is a rel­a­tively well-compensated field. The roughly 60,000 steel­work­ers in the United States make about $22 an hour, the Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics fig­ures show.

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  Filed Under: Corporatism/Fascism, New World Order, Trade, United Nations
   
  Source: http://agenda21news.com/2015/04/us-steel-warns-of-layoffs-in-arkansas-and-texas-as-trans-pacific-partnership-looms/#more-5463
  Comments
  If the Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement is adopted, we will hear the “great sucking sound” of jobs leaving the U.S. once again.  We will also have permanent open borders, endless “refugees” piling in by the millions, 50% real unemployment and the dissolution of the U.S. government as founded.
  Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader