PITTSBURGH — Steelworkers union president Leo Gerard makes no apologies for filing the trade action that led President Obama last week to impose tariffs on imported Chinese tires.
The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled that those tires caused serious harm to the U.S. tire industry, including the loss of 5,000 jobs over the last three years. Under the agreements admitting China to the World Trade Organization in 1999, its trading partners reserved the right to shield domestic industries from surges of imports from China.
“We’re completely within our rights to take action,” Gerard told reporters at the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh. But although he was “glad” Obama acted, he worried it might not be enough.
Obama imposed a 35-percent tariff, not the 55 percent the ITC recommended. Gerard said that except for a truncated restraint on steel under George W. Bush, no president had provided trade relief since Reagan.
China’s protests, including an appeal to the World Trade Organization, are unjustified, Gerard says. Obama’s action is legal, and China violates WTO rules by insisting that companies like Cooper Tire, which eliminated 1,400 jobs in Georgia when it moved its Georgia plant to China, export nearly all its Chinese products. And Gerard argues: “If you’re running a $350 to 400 billion trade surplus, you ought not to bluster too much.”
Tire dealer complaints that they’ll be hurt also ring false, since they did not build their business in just the past three years.
Gerard says the Steelworkers simply want the government to enforce trade rules, not stop trade. But he cautions that problems of contamination and defective products from China crop up with pipe, tires and steel girders as well as toys and dog food.
But he insists he’s not fighting with Chinese workers. “This is not against Chinese workers,” he says. “This is against a system that exploits us both.”
Despite Obama’s backing away from re-negotiating NAFTA, Gerard hopes his tire tariff decision indicates the administration may be open to discussing development of a new model of trade.
Richard Trumka, expected to be elected AFL-CIO president on Wednesday, has long had a strong interest in trade issues and is likely to press the issue with Obama.
“We ought to have a trade model that is more rules based, more enforced,” Gerard says. “It should raise the standards of other countries and not be based just on investment models. If we can protect Mickey Mouse, we ought to be able to protect workers.”
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
