USWA'S GERARD, AUSTRALIAN UNION LEADER: WRONG ENERGY BILL COULD DEVASTATE MANUFACTURING

Friday, June 27, 2008

(PAI)USWA’S GERARD, AUSTRALIAN UNION LEADER: WRONG ENERGY BILL COULD DEVASTATE MANUFACTURING
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

   WASHINGTON (PAI)--The wrong type of energy legislation could devastate manufacturing, causing even more high-paying industrial jobs to shift to low-wage nations overseas, Steel Workers President Leo Gerard and Australian National Workers Union National Secretary Paul Howes say.

   In an interview with several reporters on June 23--where Howes, on a visit to talk energy with U.S. lawmakers, was in USWA’s Washington office while Gerard phoned in from Las Vegas--they explained that without strong provisions to ensure jobs making new energy-efficient devices stay in the industrialized nations, the jobs would migrate to low-wage nations, just as other factory jobs have.

   The energy bill the Senate debated earlier in June, sidetracked by Republicans, did not have strong enough criteria to ensure jobs making such things as large electricity-generating windmills, solar panels and hybrid cars stayed in the U.S., USWA and its allies told lawmakers on June 5. The AFL-CIO Industrial Unions Council pushed for an 85% U.S. jobs goal, unsuccessfully.   The bill listed criteria for eligible industries.

   Gerard and Howes elaborated on that point in the interview. “A climate change bill tat is not properly put in place will be one of the final nails in the coffin of American manufacturing,” Gerard declared.

   If the legislation has carbon control provisions, higher auto fuel economy standards and clean coal technology--with government policy to help the auto firms with the switchover they need to meet the rules--plus retrofitting of buildings to stop energy waste and other investment in clean energy projects, then U.S. businesses and workers could be helped, Gerard contended. “It’s all about having the political will and the strategy to do this right,” he stated.

   Howes said “we have to tackle” what he called “the greatest challenge, changing climate in changing global relationships.”   But “we have to make sure we do it without putting our members at a disadvantage against nations like China, India and Brazil, which are not confronting” their responsibilities to curb carbon emissions that cause global warming, Howes added.

   If legislation passed that gives multi-national corporations the leeway to manufacture energy-conservation devices in low-wage nations, Howes estimated his 135,000-member union of mine workers, metal workers and similar trades “could lose 95% if our members.”

   Gerard was just as blunt. “The issue is not Pittsburgh warming, or Los Angeles warming or Chicago warming. It’s global warming. If we’re going to manage the transition” to a more energy-efficient world “we have to deal with the leakage” that lets multinationals transfer high-carbon-emitting operations overseas, he added.   That’s in addition to their transfers of jobs in low carbon-emitting industries.

   Certain industries attempting toe make the transition to cleaner technologies, notably cement and steel, could particularly suffer without safeguards against such factory transfers overseas, Gerard said.

   The energy bill senators debated--and dumped--needed stronger competitive-ness provisions for U.S. workers, according to the June 5 letter from the BlueGreen Alliance, a joint Steel Workers-Sierra Club coalition that unites the union with environmental causes.

   “We urge the competitiveness provisions of the legislation be strengthened to ensure that existing manufacturing capacity in the U.S. is not encouraged to relocate offshore to avoid the increased costs of energy resulting from the pricing of carbon” including measures to cut down on carbon emissions, the alliance’s letter, signed by Gerard and Sierra Club chief Carl Pope said.

   “If no further efforts are made to strengthen the provisions, much of the new manufacturing associated with investments in the clean renewable energy economy”--which USWA has been pushing for years--“will likewise take place far from the communities in our country that are so desperate for these employment opportunities.”

   Many of those cities and towns are in the Northeastern and Midwestern industrial states, stretching from Minnesota and Missouri through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where USWA is strong--and where a lot of plants have closed. “As we craft the necessary and scientifically based solutions to global warming, we must make sure we do not worsen their plight,” Gerard and Pope wrote of those areas.

   The U.S. is key to the struggle, Howes said after his visits with the Congressional Steel Caucus and both parties on Capitol Hill. That’s because the U.S. is the only economy large enough to influence China, India, Brazil and other nations to sign on to carbon emission caps and a cross-border system to prevent migration of plants or jobs. But that’s only if the U.S. agrees to such carbon emissions controls itself, Howes said.

   The anti-worker GOP Bush regime is hostile to capping carbon emissions and opposed the energy bill. By contrast, Australia’s new Labour government, after intense consultations with unions, industry and others in coming months, plans to introduce a carbon-cap bill with an emissions-trading scheme by March 2009. If enacted, the plan would start Jan. 1, 2010. Its goal is a 60% cut in emissions by 2050. ###