Workers steal the show in TPT’s new Ford plant film

January 10, 2019 by

The Twin Cities Assembly Plant in Highland Park is gone, but the stories of people who worked there live on in a new, hour-long documentary airing on Twin Cities PBS stations next week.

In “Made in St. Paul: Stories from the Ford plant,” filmmaker Peter B. Myers covers more than 86 years of Ford Motor Company’s history in St. Paul, from Henry Ford’s decision to build a hydro-powered plant along the Mississippi River to the plant’s final shutdown in December 2011.

The documentary “could’ve been a three-hour show,” Myers said, but focuses in on “the plant’s origins, its engineering and architecture, labor issues, and its impact on the development of the city of St. Paul over an 86-year period.”

Ultimately, Myers said, the film is about the people who made a living inside the plant’s walls. He interviewed dozens of them in nearly two years of work on the project.

“Most of the people I talked to spent pretty much their whole careers at this one plant,” Myers said. “This was their life. And across the board, all the workers I talked to felt a great deal of loyalty to this particular plant and took tremendous pride in the quality of their work.”

That sense of pride showed, as workers consistently made St. Paul Ford’s most productive U.S. facility. Ford’s decision to close stemmed not from personnel issues, but changing market trends and a need to modernize the facility, which would have cost $500 million, according to the company.

Also featured prominently in the film is local historian Brian McMahon, author of “The Ford Century in Minnesota,” published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016.

Myers met McMahon, credited as the film’s principal researcher, around the time of the Ford plant’s closing. Myers was at work on another film – a deep dive into the history of University Avenue – at the time, but he was immediately drawn to the idea exploring “the legacy of something as big as the Ford plant” and its impact on Highland Park, where he’s lived for more than 30 years.

Myers pitched the idea to TPT as his neighbors engaged in public discussion about what redevelopment of the 135-acre Ford site should look like. The debate served as a reminder of just how unique the Twin Cities Assembly Plant was: an enormous industrial site that shared a neighborhood with mostly upper-middle class homes.

“As I followed what’s going to happen on the site now, I thought we should really tell some of the stories about the plant,” Myers said. “Once these folks are gone, they won’t be able to tell the stories anymore.”

Of course, the union that represented workers at the Ford plant, United Auto Workers Local 879, features prominently in the film. Workers at the plant chartered Local 879 in June 1941, but it wasn’t without a fight, as the film documents.

“We tell the story about how Henry Ford for a long time resisted the efforts of labor to organize in his plants,” Myers said. “Ford was the last of the ‘Big 3’ automakers to allow the UAW into the plants, which he did finally in 1941.”

The result of unionization in St. Paul, he added, was dramatic.

“In the ‘40s and ‘50s, working conditions were pretty challenging, and it wasn’t always a nice place to come to work,” he said. “But over the decades the UAW and Ford really approached the organization of the pant in a joint fashion. By the time you got to the ‘70s and ‘80s, by most accounts, things were working pretty smoothly.”

“Made in St. Paul: Stories from the Ford plant” premieres Monday at 9 p.m. on TPT-2, part of the station’s “Minnesota Experience” series. It will rebroadcast at 8 p.m. Jan. 17 on TPT-LIFE, and be available for streaming on www.tpt.org.

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#NAW2016: Apprenticeship helps MN manufacturers boost skills, stay competitive

November 17, 2016 by
Pictured on the Hood Packaging shop floor in Arden Hills: (L to R) USW’s Gerry Parzino, Beth diGrazia, USW member and apprentice Larteng Kong, apprentice Dave Frisk, USW member and apprentice Andy Ramirez, Mike Ramirez and Local 264 President John O’Neil.

Pictured on the Hood Packaging shop floor in Arden Hills: (L to R) USW’s Gerry Parzino, Beth diGrazia, USW member and apprentice Larteng Kong, apprentice Dave Frisk, USW member and apprentice Andy Ramirez, Mike Ramirez and Local 264 President John O’Neil.

 

About 85 percent of registered apprentices in Minnesota are employed in the construction trades, but federal grant funds are helping more of the state’s manufacturers harness the power of apprenticeship to boost their employees’ skills – and remain competitive in a global economy.

Hood Packaging is among a growing number of firms taking advantage of a free registered apprenticeship program for industrial workers, sponsored by the AFL-CIO’s Working for America Institute.

A privately owned company with 20 production facilities in the U.S. and Canada, Hood employs about 86 people at a facility in Arden Hills, where members of United Steelworkers Local 264 print and laminate poly-film packaging for salted snacks and pet food.

When the Steelworkers came to Operations Manager Michael Ramirez with a pitch for the apprenticeship program, Ramirez and human resources officer Beth diGrazia jumped at the opportunity.

“For a lot of our workers, this isn’t just a job they’re going to leave; these are careers,” diGrazia said. “We want to keep them here, so if we have folks who want to learn more, we want to give them that opportunity.”

Four Hood employees – three Steelworkers and a manager – are currently enrolled in the fourth semester of the 18-month program. Every Thursday evening, they assemble in a conference room with two large screens and connect via Skype with an instructor, as well as apprentices from other Minnesota manufacturing firms.

Coursework ranges from safety to quality control and beyond, and it’s typical for apprentices to receive up to six hours of homework each week. They take quizzes and tests, and receive a grade at the end of each course.

So far, all four Hood apprentices are keeping their grade point average above 3.0.

“They’re doing their work,” United Steelworkers representative Gerry Parzino said. “I don’t think you get those grades by accident.”

If they keep it up, the apprentices, who are paid for the time they spend in class, will complete the program – and receive their journeyperson cards – in June 2017.

“These guys are showing the initiative,” diGrazia said. “They’re stepping up. And we hope they’ll never leave the company, but it is something that’s transferable, and it definitely looks good on their resume.”

For Ramirez, the apprenticeship program is providing Hood with future leaders ready to help train their co-workers, troubleshoot problems on the shop floor and keep an eye out for safety issues. He’s already seeing results: Hood sent 15 employees through the apprenticeship’s safety course last January, and the Arden Hills facility hasn’t had a safety incident since then.

“It’s the longest stretch we’ve ever gone at this facility without any recordable or lost-time incidents,” Ramirez said. “And that’s a direct effect of these guys going through that program and using that info on the floor. The results speak for themselves.”

Parzino wants to see other union employers take advantage of the industrial apprenticeship program, which Ramirez called “a big win-win for all of us.”

“To be competitive, we need the highest trained workforce we can possibly have,” Parzino said. “In Wisconsin, some of these programs have brought back products that were being manufactured in India. So we know this can have an impact.

“It’s all about job security, quality and being competitive, and we can keep these manufacturing jobs. We think by working with the employers and with our members to keep them as trained as possible, these kinds of programs are going to keep us competitive.”

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Public finally gets a look at TPP – and it isn’t pretty

November 5, 2015 by

web.tpp-aboveLabor, environmental and other fair-trade activists are getting their first look at the Tran-Pacific Partnership, released to the public overnight. Their initial reaction?

It’s worse than expected.

“It’s absolutely not a progressive trade deal,” Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition director Kaela Berg said after an early analysis of the text.

“It’s clear that TPP will perpetuate offshoring of our jobs and stagnation of our wages. There aren’t strong, enforceable labor and environmental standards, which have been a constant worry since NAFTA.”

[Tell your members of Congress to oppose the TPP! Click here to take action.]

The public release of the TPP, a 12-nation trade agreement covering about 40 percent of the global economy, starts the clock on a 90-day review period, after which Congress may approve or reject – but not amend – the pact.

Berg said the Fair Trade Coalition, which unites family-farm, environmental and labor groups, would use the review period to educate the public about what’s at stake in the TPP – and to lobby Minnesota’s Congressional delegation to vote “no.”

All seven DFLers in Congress voted against so-called “fast track” authorization, which positioned TPP for a simple up-or-down vote, over the summer, and Berg was cautiously optimistic they would vote to reject TPP as well. Republican Reps. Tom Emmer and Erik Paulsen are “poster boys for corporate free-trade,” she added, and likely to vote “yes.”

“All the officials are going to want to look at the text and see what’s in there,” Berg said.

Many union officials were busy doing the same today, leading to a chorus of warnings about the TPP’s impact on jobs, wages, public health and more.

“This much is clear,” said Rick Ryan of the Minnesota State Council of Machinists after a first read through the TPP. “The rich get richer as we race to the bottom.”

Citizens Trade Campaign, a fair-trade advocacy group, said the TPP would force U.S. workers to compete with workers abroad who, in some member countries, earn less than $1 per hour. It also would ban laws that encourage government agencies to buy American-made or locally made products.

“TPP will do nothing to promote manufacturing jobs here in the U.S.” Bob Ryan, a Minnesota-based representative of the United Steelworkers, said. “In fact, it will promote more job loss through outsourcing to low wage countries.”

Nurses warned of a provision in the TPP that protects multinational pharmaceutical companies by delaying the introduction of generic drugs into the market, making health care more expensive and life-saving medicines harder to access. In fact, the TPP would roll back some of the protections for access to medicine included in trade agreements negotiated during the George W. Bush administration.

National Nurses United President RoseAnn DeMoro likened the provisions to “gifts to the billionaire drug companies,” and called the TPP “a cruel and disgraceful threat to the lives of millions of people.”

The TPP also threatens U.S. sovereignty, critics said. It would grant corporations new powers to challenge U.S. laws, regulations and court decisions in an extrajudicial tribunal known as the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) court.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, the highest-ranking labor leader in the U.S., pledged unions would “join with our allies to defeat the TPP.”

“From what we have already seen, it is clear that the threats of this expansive new agreement outweigh its benefits – for good jobs, for democracy, for affordable medicines, for consumer safety, and for the environment,” Trumka said.

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In Minnesota, apprenticeship model expanding to other industries

June 26, 2015 by

Apprenticeship has long been the backbone of the Building Trades unions. Their on-the-job training programs put workers on a path to family-sustaining careers while ensuring union contractors have access to the highly skilled labor pool they need to remain competitive.

It’s a win-win model.

Now, with a push from the federal government, unions and employers in other industries are looking to emulate it.

Minnesota is one of three states where the AFL-CIO’s Working for America Institute, armed with a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, is promoting a registered apprenticeship program for industrial manufacturing workers. It’s an 18-month, 3,000-hour training course that employers can access at no cost to boost their workers’ skills.

Several Minnesota manufacturers are warming up to the idea of partnering with a union on an apprenticeship course, program coordinator Jerome Balsimo said.

“Employers have said to us, ‘This is a recruiting tool,’” Balsimo said. “‘There are four or five other manufacturers right next to us, but I’m the manufacturer that has the apprenticeship program, wage increase and industry-recognized certifications when you finish. Come work for us.’”

Among those employers is Baldinger Bakery in St. Paul. After being approached by its workers’ union, BCTGM Local 22, Baldinger agreed to install the Industrial Manufacturing Technician apprenticeship program, which will launch later this year.

The company, which manufactures buns for McDonald’s and other restaurants, recently relocated to a “rebuilt, high-tech facility” on Phalen Boulevard, Local 22 President Ron Mohrland said. Management viewed the apprenticeship program as an opportunity to ensure workers’ skills keep pace.

Much of the training curriculum is standardized, with MnSCU faculty facilitating. But Baldinger is able to customize many aspects to meet the plant’s needs.

“There’s a basic education that these guys are getting, but the plant is helping write the program to what needs to be taught specifically at our facility,” Mohrland said.

About one-third of the 60-plus union members working in the facility are expected to participate, from new hires to more experienced factory workers. Apprentices will get paid for the time they spend in classroom or on-the-job training, and when they complete the program, they will add seven industry-recognized credentials and certifications to their resumes – not to mention the $1.50 per hour raise.

“They’re going to go from walking in the door as a helper to the very top scale, something called a bakery processor,” Mohrland said. “That’s somebody who can pretty much walk in there can do anything – from minor maintenance to running the machines all around the facility.”

Industrial unions like the BCTGM aren’t the only ones eying apprenticeship opportunities as an added value to union membership. Todd Dahlstrom, the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s organizing and growth director, said another federal grant is in the works to boost health care workers’ skills and wages via apprenticeship.

“The union does grievances, the union does arbitration, the union negotiates contracts – all fundamental things that are very, very important. But they’re not always tangible to a new employee,” Dahlstrom said.

“If workers understand that they get their training and certificate for that training through a program their union has helped develop and offer, you get workers on the front end and give them a stronger union identity.”

– Interested in the Industrial Manufacturing Technician apprenticeship? Contact program coordinator Jerome Balsimo at 651-335-2896 or Jbalsimo@mnaflcio.org.

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Labor urges Congress to pump the brakes on fast track

February 23, 2015 by
U.S. Reps. Keith Ellison and Rick Nolan host a field hearing on trade at Richfield City Hall.

U.S. Reps. Keith Ellison and Rick Nolan host a field hearing on trade at Richfield City Hall.

Unions are joining a national day of action to stop fast track March 4, and two members of Congress from Minnesota got an earful as to why last week at a field hearing in Richfield.

DFL Reps. Keith Ellison and Rick Nolan heard testimony from trade experts, union leaders, business owners and advocates for family farmers, who passionately exhorted the representatives to resist President Obama’s push for fast-track authority to enter trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership.

The Obama administration, looking for ever-elusive common ground with Republicans who took over Congress this year, has moved fast track and the TPP to the top of its agenda. And the president has plenty of powerful allies in that effort, Nolan warned.

“Not only the administration, but the multinational (corporations) are putting a full-court press on this thing,” the 8th District Congressman said. “Every member is getting collared and called and pushed and urged.”

Ellison wryly noted that White House representatives reached out to him as he was leaving Washington to return to the 5th District, letting him know they were aware of the field hearing – and less than pleased with it.

But testimony at the hearing raised several concerns with fast track and the TPP, a looming NAFTA-style trade agreement among 12 nations on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

An undemocratic notion

By passing fast track, also known as “trade promotion authority,” Congress would limit its own ability to influence trade policy, forcing members to take an up-or-down votes on 1,000-page trade agreements like TPP without offering amendments.

“That’s clearly an abdication of responsibility on the part of the Congress of the United States,” Nolan said.

Worse, members of Congress are severely limited in their ability to monitor or influence the TPP negotiations, Nolan added. Draft agreements and transcripts of the talks are shielded from the media.

“We’re not allowed to even sit in on the negotiations,” Nolan said. “Now, finally, they’re saying they’ll let us look at some of the transcripts, but all the names and all the essential elements are eliminated. It’s kind of like reading the newspaper with a third of every article being eliminated. So it’s not really time very well spent.”

Machinists union representative Rick Ryan (R) testified before a field hearing on fast track and the Trans Pacific Partnership last month. Ryan appeared on a panel with CWA Minnesota State Council President Mona Meyer and Bob Ryan of the United Steelworkers.

Machinists union representative Rick Ryan (R) testifies before a field hearing on fast track and the Trans Pacific Partnership. Ryan appeared on a panel with CWA Minnesota State Council President Mona Meyer and Bob Ryan of the United Steelworkers.

Profits over people

Leaked drafts of the TPP hint at why Obama’s trade negotiators and hundreds of cleared “advisors” – most of whom represent multinational corporations – might not want the public to see their proposals. Like NAFTA and other free-trade agreements of the last 20 years, TPP appears to give corporations more power over the global economy.

These multinationals have dictated U.S. trade policies at the expense of middle-class wages and jobs for too long, said Mona Meyer, president of the Communications Workers of America’s Minnesota State Council. Look no further than the annual trade deficit of $476 billion.

“The promoters of TPP are again promising job gains,” Meyer said. “But we can do the math, and any job growth with be dwarfed by the flood of jobs that go offshore.”

Trade agreements put manufacturing jobs, in particular, at risk. About 6 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and 60,000 factories have been lost since 2001.

Nilfisk, a company that manufactures industrial floor-cleaning equipment, employed 500 members of the Machinists union at a facility in Plymouth before NAFTA passed. After several rounds of outsourcing, Machinists District 77 representative Rick Ryan said, about 70 workers are left at the plant.

But Ryan warned the TPP goes beyond tariffs and trade.

‘Why are we not at the table?’

“It will affect all sectors of our economy, our courts, our intellectual property rights, labor standards, environmental standards and more – done at the bidding of the world’s largest multinational corporations, further benefiting the 0.1 percent at the expense of the 99.9 percent worldwide,” Ryan said.

How? Dave Levine, CEO of the American Sustainable Business Council, said TPP language could empower corporations to sue local governments that pass “buy local” laws – a school district looking to serve food from area farmers at lunch, for example. It’s one reason the council’s 225,000 member companies oppose fast track and the TPP.

“None of them got a call to be at the table,” he said. “If it’s good for business, why are we not at the table to bring our interests to the proceedings?”

Josh Wise, director of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, noted that the TPP and other trade agreements create extrajudicial trade tribunals, presided over by judges with deep ties to multinationals, that have jurisdiction over local courts.

Lone Pine Resources, an energy company suing the government of Quebec over its ban on fracking, maintains its headquarters outside Canada “for the sole purpose of being able to challenge the fracking ban via the trade court rather than the judicial system,” Wise said.

Fair trade, not free trade

Ellison and Nolan entered the hearing already opposed to fast track and the TPP. Both insisted they were not against trade, but favored trade policies that strengthen labor and human rights, protect U.S. families us from unsafe imports and promote the export of goods instead of jobs.

“We built this economy with rules and regulations on health and safety, wages and benefits,” Nolan said. “To say that we’re going to allow anyone and everyone to come in here and dump their products on us without any countervailing measures … is to really destroy the essence of who we are and what we’re all about.”

Ellison added, “I believe American workers can compete with any workers in the world” if given a level playing field.

“I know that you guys will fight for democracy,” Wise told the members of Congress. “I wish you the best of luck in convincing your colleagues to do the same.”

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A Model for Disaster: Report details NAFTA’s impact over 20 years

May 1, 2014 by
NAFTA drew protests in Minnesota before its implementation (left), but debate surrounding the model for trade it established 20 years ago continues with the TPP today (right).

NAFTA drew protests in Minnesota before its implementation (left), but debate surrounding the model for trade it established 20 years ago continues today with the TPP (right).

In the early 1990s, Doug Williams was serving as president of Local 1140 of the International Union of Electrical Workers, an industrial union that has since folded into the Communications Workers. Williams and other union activists, particularly in the industrial sector, were in full campaign mode at the time, handing out fliers during shift changes, staging public rallies and demonstrating in the streets.

But it was neither an election nor a strike that had them fired up. Rather, it was a looming trade pact – the first of its kind – with Mexico and Canada. The agreement would do away with most tariffs and economic protections.

“What little we knew about the trade agreement at the time, it did not appear to be something that was going to be of benefit to folks who had to work for a living,” Williams, now on staff with the IUE-CWA, remembered. “We were doing our best to stop what appeared to be a corporate power grab.”

Unions like the IUE joined a broad coalition of environmental, family-farm and other community organizations urging Congress to stop the trade deal. They “tried to engage people around the state,” Williams said, and even worked in collaboration with allies in Mexico and Canada. “Anybody who was willing to participate, we were looking to work with.”

Despite the protests – and over warnings from economists that it would depress wages, uproot jobs and drive farmers off their land – the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect Jan. 1, 1994.

What’s happened in the 20 years since is the subject of a report released in March by the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation. “NAFTA at 20” finds the fears surrounding NAFTA shared by Williams and other trade unionists 20 years ago were largely warranted, and they’ve played out with disastrous implications for workers’ rights, income inequality and democracy in all three nations.

But equally damaging, according to both the AFL-CIO report and trade watchdogs based in Minnesota, is the model for expanded corporate power that NAFTA established – one the U.S. would copy and “enhance” in global trade negotiations over the next two decades. NAFTA remains the template negotiators are working off of in talks for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the latest – and largest – attempted free-trade deal to date.

“There is no success story for workers to be found in North America 20 years after NAFTA,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. “The NAFTA model focuses on lifting corporations out of reach of democratic governance, rather than solely reducing tariffs. This report should serve as a cautionary tale to the Obama Administration and Congress as they consider negotiating and implementing new trade deals.”

Activists in Northfield protested NAFTA more than 20 years ago in this Union Advocate file photo.

Activists in Northfield protested NAFTA more than 20 years ago in this Union Advocate file photo.

Fears came true

Proponents of NAFTA 20 years ago – like those who defend the agreement today – argued that by reducing tariffs and other barriers to trade, NAFTA would increase trade among the three North American countries. Increased trade, it followed, would result in job growth throughout the free-trade zone. While lobbying Congress to approve the pact, President Bill Clinton claimed NAFTA would create 200,000 new jobs per year in the U.S. alone.

In hindsight, Clinton and other NAFTA backers were only half right.

The volume trade flowing among the U.S., Canada and Mexico surged from $291 billion in 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, to $1.1 trillion in 2012. Trade patterns, however, shifted dramatically and unequally, with disastrous ramifications for workers in all three countries.

Before NAFTA, the U.S. actually had a small trade surplus with Mexico – meaning it exported more goods than it imported. But that changed quickly after 1994, as the U.S. trade deficit with its NAFTA partners has ballooned to $181 billion.

According to the AFL-CIO report, NAFTA allowed companies to move labor-intensive components of their operations to locations with weak labor laws and lax enforcement of wage, environmental and other standards. Manufacturers took advantage, displacing an estimated 682,900 U.S. jobs to Mexico.

Minnesota has lost about 14,000 jobs to Mexico in the last two decades, Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition Director Josh Wise said.

“And it’s still happening,” Wise added. “A company in Mankato called Midwest Electric just moved last summer. This practice of outsourcing over the last 20 years is actually still happening at a fairly rapid pace.”

Challenge to collective bargaining

With the job losses came a new wave of challenges for unions, which saw their membership rolls decline sharply, as manufacturing has been a traditional base of strength for organized labor.

Rick Ryan, a business representative for District 77 of the International Association of Machinists, can point to several employers that have outsourced Machinists’ jobs to Mexico, including the Danish company Nilfisk, which manufactures industrial floor-cleaning equipment at a facility in Plymouth.

Machinists Local Lodge 1037 used to represent more than 500 Nilfisk workers, Ryan said. After several rounds of outsourcing, only about 80 Machinists are left working in the facility.

“We built a lot of the components for the machines there – we’d take raw sheet metal, form it, bend it, weld it and make the components,” Ryan said. “Now they’ve outsourced all that work to wherever, and they’ve taken and outsourced the assembly of all but the very biggest of these machines down to Mexico.”

The IUE, Williams said, represented workers at 21 facilities in Minnesota before NAFTA; that number is down to 16 today. “They’ve all been impacted by the trade issue,” he said.

Even when employers didn’t pick up and move, they were sure to let workers know it was an option – especially during contract negotiations.

“It has been very difficult to get anywhere near a raise that might get anywhere close to keeping up with the cost of living, and it’s because of this constant threat that if we ask for too much or get too much, they’re going to shut ‘er down and go to wherever – name your country,” Ryan said. “That has put a real hard pressure on wages for our bargaining units.

“I hear it from the members when you talk to them. They want more money, but they’re afraid – the unspoken threat is always there. It’s always in their mind.”

When unions are constantly negotiating concessions – or negotiating severance packages for workers who’ve lost their jobs to trade – it also makes organizing a tough sell, Ryan added

“’Well those union guys, they couldn’t stop the company from moving.’ That’s the kind of thing you hear,” Ryan said. “And when you try to organize, workers say, ‘If we organize they’ll shut it down, they’ll move production.’ And they’re told that by management.”

By weakening the power of unions and incentivizing low wages, NAFTA has contributed to growing income inequality in all three partner countries – despite consistent gains in worker productivity, the AFL-CIO report finds.

web.nafta-streetsCorporate power grab

While workers saw their rights attacked and wages stagnate under NAFTA, corporations saw their powers expand and their profits soar – thanks to the free-trade model established 20 years ago.

Beyond reducing tariffs, NAFTA created new privileges and protections for corporations that allow them to challenge local laws, government regulations or other “barriers to trade” that could interfere with their actual or potential profits. NAFTA established unelected international panels – “unaccountable to the public,” the AFL-CIO report points out – to hear these complaints and award monetary compensation.

It’s called investor-to-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, and according to the AFL-CIO report, it may be NAFTA’s most enduring and troubling legacy, as the practice has been included – and expanded upon – in subsequent free-trade agreements.

“NAFTA set a precedent for how corporations could gain control over writing trade laws,” Wise said. “They realized they could achieve a whole host of deregulation and other legislative victories through trade negotiations that they couldn’t achieve through Congress, and it’s really accelerated the global race to the bottom.”

ISDS empowers foreign investors – mostly multinational corporations – to challenge “buy-local” laws, living-wage provisions and regulations designed to protect consumers, patent holders and the environment.

Exxon Mobil won $60 million from the Canadian government two years ago, arguing that local regulations requiring oil companies to fund research and development in Canada’s poorest provinces constituted a barrier to trade. Mexico had to pay Cargill for laws regulating high-fructose corn syrup.

And who’s on the hook for these monetary damages? The taxpayers. In all, NAFTA governments have paid at least $340 million to “investors” since the agreement took effect.

Of course, similar protections for workers – say, the right to sue a country for establishing barriers to union organizing – are not part of the NAFTA model.

“Unlike the procedures that protect investor rights, the complaint procedures for violations of labor or environmental standards are exceedingly slow and cumbersome, and provide no reasonable possibility of sanctions being imposed for noncompliance,” the AFL-CIO report reads.

Fight for fair trade continues

Frighteningly, the ISDS language written into NAFTA seems tame in comparison to what’s in the Obama administration’s top trade priority, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It expands ISDS protections from traditional goods and services to intellectual property and financial services.

But fair-trade activists celebrated a big victory when Congress refused to grant Obama “fast-track” authority for the TPP and other trade deals – a sign, they hope, that increased public awareness about ISDS and the damaging effects of the NAFTA model are yielding increased public outrage.

Twenty years after taking to the streets to fight NAFTA, labor unions are continuing to partner in the struggle for fair trade.

“When folks are made aware of what’s going on, they seem to be universally opposed to the idea of the TPP,” Williams said. “Labor’s challenge is to recognize it’s going to take more than labor; it requires community partners. We all need to work together to produce a framework for trade that members of the public can see themselves included in.”

web.nafta-penny

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St. Paul Steelworkers pitch manufacturing policy to Dems’ platform committee

August 3, 2012 by

Bob Ryan, a Steelworker from St. Paul’s Rock-Tenn paper-recycling plant, addresses the DNC platform committee.

Eighteen of the nation’s most prominent lawmakers listened last weekend as two Steelworkers from St. Paul testified about the importance of revitalizing the U.S. economy with initiatives designed to grow middle-class manufacturing jobs.

Bob Ryan and David Hallas, members of the United Steelworkers union, addressed the committee charged with drafting the Democratic Party’s platform in advance of its national convention Sept. 4-6 in Charlotte. The Platform Committee met in Minneapolis the weekend of July 27.

Ryan and Hallas offered committee members several suggestions for supporting American manufacturers and the middle-class workers they employ, including infrastructure investments, “Buy American” laws and trade agreements that level the playing field for domestic manufacturers.

“My manufacturing union job at the paper mill has given me a good, middle-class standard- of- living,” Ryan told committee members. “America now desperately needs a Democratic vision for how to address our national and local economic … challenges to keep us a strong economy in the global marketplace.”

Ryan is a member of Steelworkers Local 264, which represents 500 workers at the Rock-Tenn plant in St. Paul’s Midway district. Hallas is a member of Local 7263, representing 350 workers at the Gerdau Long Steel plant, located off Highway 61 and Interstate 494.

Ryan reflected for committee members on what the Rock-Tenn plant has meant to his family, which enjoys a “good, middle-class standard of living” as a result of his job, he said.

But like many manufacturing jobs, Ryan’s has been threatened in an era of global competition, as companies are increasingly able to exploit cheap labor supplies overseas. Rock-Tenn, a paper recycler, competes with companies that collect waste paper from municipalities and, in turn, ship it to recycling companies in China.

“Waste paper is now the largest export by volume to China,” Ryan said. “Instead of exporting waste paper, we should keep it here to create and sustain good jobs for value-added products in the U.S.”

To protect jobs like Ryan’s, he said, Democrats must commit to policies that reward companies for keeping jobs in the U.S. The party’s leaders also must commit to confronting China and other countries that fail to abide by the rules of fair trade, particularly when it comes to currency manipulation and protectionism.

“The Asian tiger refuses to play by the rules of global trade and sees trade as a one-way ticket to our market, without our having the competitive access to their own markets,” Ryan said. “This must stop.”

Hallas offered another suggestion for revitalizing the manufacturing sector: pairing increased investment in public infrastructure with “Buy American” laws that ensure the materials used to build and repair highways, bridges and water systems come from U.S. companies whenever possible.

Hallas talked about the pride he and other workers at Gerdau took in producing the 63-millimeter anchor bar bolts that secure the new Interstate 35-W bridge to bedrock in Minneapolis.

“I remember well that as the steel bars moved from one work station to the next, we steelworkers reminded each other of our skills and the importance of what we were doing,” he said.

Hallas also responded to criticisms of “Buy American” laws – that they create inefficiency and waste, that they could spark trade wars with other countries.

“Most industrialized countries already utilize their own domestic procurement requirements,” Hallas said, pointing to “Buy Canadian” laws and “Buy European” laws in Canada and the European Union. “Providing a preference for domestic content is fully within the rights of the United States.

“As national polling shows, Americans not only support U.S. manufacturers and their workers, but they also favor ‘Buy America’ preferences when their tax dollars are spent on public infrastructure projects. American voters understand what’s at stake: good-paying jobs and the strength of the U.S. economy.”

The U.S. economy’s manufacturing sector was hit particularly hard during the most-recent recession. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry lost 2 million jobs – or 17 percent of its workforce – between December 2007 and December 2009, when U.S. manufacturing employment fell to its lowest level in six decades.

Efforts to stem the tide of job losses took a hit last month, when Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have eliminated a tax credit U.S. employers use to move jobs overseas – and replaced it with a 20 percent tax break for the costs of moving jobs back to the U.S.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fair trade activists to Cargill: What’s the big secret?

July 20, 2012 by

Members of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition protest outside Cargill’s offices in Hopkins.

If free-trade agreements like the forthcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership are in the public interest, then why are they negotiated in private?

That’s the question supporters of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition asked during a July 9 rally in Hopkins. The coalition of labor, environmental and agricultural organizations is mounting a public campaign to pressure the Obama administration into opening Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations to public scrutiny.

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an 11-country free-trade deal that could eventually encompass half of the world,” coalition director Josh Wise told a crowd of about 50 demonstrators. “It’s huge. It’s big. And the public is being entirely shut out.”

So, too, are journalists and members of Congress. The agreement could create legally binding policies regarding agriculture, workers’ rights and intellectual-property rights – without any input from U.S. lawmakers during negotiations.

Not surprisingly, 132 members of Congress have signed a complaint, addressed to the Obama administration’s chief trade negotiator, that Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations have not been sufficiently open to public or congressional scrutiny. Protesters in Hopkins echoed those concerns.

Protesters line the sidewalk outside Cargill, protesting the company’s influence on Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which are closed to the public.

“We could say that transparency is synonymous with truth,” Colombian fair-trade activist Gerardo Cajamarca told the crowd via a translator. “When we’re demanding transparency, we’re also demanding truth and justice.”

Cajamarca and other demonstrators gathered outside offices of Cargill, the multinational food- and agriculture-based corporation headquartered in the Twin Cities. Cargill is one of a handful of companies granted access to – and influence on – Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.

That multinational corporations have been granted access to the trade talks worries fair-trade activists, who suspect the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be written to benefit companies like Cargill at the expense of workers, small farmers and the environment.

“It is lies that companies like Cargill use to impose free-trade agreements,” Cajamarca said. “They have told the world that free-trade agreements are going to bring prosperity and progress and development to the rest of the world. This is false.”

Indeed, the track record of existing free-trade agreements – NAFTA, CAFTA and the Korea Free Trade Agreement, among others – has not been good, particularly for manufacturing workers in the U.S.

Bob Ryan, a representative with the United Steelworkers union, said companies already are flooding the American market with cheap products, made by low-wage workers overseas. Free-trade agreements only make that process easier, and that’s bad news for American workers.

Ryan offered this example: The Korea Free Trade Agreement, he said, enables automakers like Nissan to build cars with cheaply made auto parts and export them to the U.S., where they compete with cars built in the U.S. by Ford and General Motors.

“Ninety-five percent of every car that’s made in the United States, the Steelworkers represent the workers who make those parts,” Ryan explained. “Every car that comes into the United States (from Korea) is one less job for us.

“Companies like Cargill, they’re just out for their pockets – nobody else’s. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t care what they do to workers. That’s why we’re here today; we’ve got to stop these rotten trade agreements.

“We should keep these jobs in America.”

For more information on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or to get involved in the struggle for fair trade, visit the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition’s website.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,