Thread: Stop trading away American jobs: Obama and labor must unite

Stop trading away American jobs: Obama and labor must unite to restore U.S. manufacturing



Errol Louis

Thursday, June 10th 2010, 4:00 AM

WASHINGTON - Weeks of behind-the-scenes griping and sniping between unions and the White House burst into open view this week when the AFL-CIO's all-out campaign to defeat Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas in a Democratic runoff fell short. To shore up his political fortunes - not to mention the American economy - President Obama must now figure out how to heal the growing rift with big labor.

The labor federation had good reason to try to make an example of Lincoln. She enraged unions by voting against a public option during the health care reform fight and by refusing to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier to organize unions.

Sinking in the polls in Arkansas, where the anti-union juggernaut Walmart is headquartered, Lincoln became a symbol of the kind of Democrat unions simply had to oppose. But Lincoln outmaneuvered the efforts of busloads of union organizers and millions worth of television ads.

She had a friend in Obama, who refused to back off a pledge to support Lincoln's reelection, holding to a big-tent view of party politics that maximizes the number of Dems in Congress but rubs many left-leaning activists the wrong way.

Shortly after the polls closed, an unnamed White House official contacted Ben Smith of Politico to gloat about the Lincoln victory.

"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."

Ouch.

Now that both sides have taken hard shots at each other, it's time to get back to the main business at hand: stanching the flow of jobs out of America.

The situation is grim. "We've lost about a third of all our manufacturing jobs in the country over the last decade," says Paul Scott, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an advocacy group started by the steel industry and steelworkers unions. "We've actually lost industrial capacity in this country. We didn't even do that during the Great Depression."

Consider the following: On the day before the Arkansas showdown, Apple Computer unveiled the newest incarnation of the wildly popular iPhone - which, like many other products of Yankee ingenuity, will be built overseas.

That should provoke bipartisan rage in every region of the country - and swift action in Washington to fix the trade imbalance that allows other nations to get jobs that belong here.

"We invented the Internet. We invented GPS. We invented the solar panel, the wind turbine. Same with the semiconductor. We've lost all of that," says Scott.

He's right. There's almost nothing you can buy, from sneakers to the Kindle electronic book, that's made in the U.S.A.

Labor activists should dredge up video from the 2008 presidential primaries. Back then, Obama and Hillary Clinton spent countless hours making extravagant promises to reexamine NAFTA, CAFTA and other U.S. trade agreements and policies in order to end corporate incentives to buy and build overseas.

The time has come to made good on those promises. Obama has begun to reverse some of Washington's most egregious, job-killing policies. He has levied tariffs on China for violating trade agreements and has a chance to go further when the G-20 club of the world's largest economies convenes in Canada later this month.

But this must be only the beginning.

Labor activists will be watching closely to see if Obama will make good on a pledge to lodge a formal protest against China's manipulation of its currency, which artificially depresses the cost of Chinese goods and gives corporations an incentive to ship jobs and supply contracts to the Communist superpower.

One worry, according to activists, is that Washington has been quiet about trade and currency issues to secure support from China on unrelated matters like the imposition of sanctions against Iran for violating anti-nuclear treaties.

If that is true, the entire nation should be up in arms. Trading America's economic future for a handful of admittedly important diplomatic advances is too high a price to pay.

Now would be the ideal time for a campaign to dramatize America's trade woes and build public support for White House action on the issue. If the unions can swallow wounded pride - and see if there's any money left over from the Arkansas debacle - perhaps they can get on the same page with Obama and help fix our broken economy

New York Daily News
http://tinyurl.com/32qpkf9

NAFTA should go away.

NAFTA is a Giant scam and ripoff on the citizens of the U S...If you subject the people of the U S to NAFTA then ALL of our state and federal employees need to be subject to comparable salaries of their international counterparts...Government employees of other nations etc.

NAFTA needs to be sufficiently funded for it to work properly and among investors the Mexican Americans and Mexican citizens living in the United States are the most critical participants. They have to stop allowing their remittances to go to direct consumption or there will be little improvement and continued lack of economic control.