***** New York Times 6 June 2001
Bush Moves Against Steel Imports
By JOSEPH KAHN
WASHINGTON, June 5 - President Bush took the first steps today toward imposing broad restrictions on imported steel, handing a victory to American steel companies and unions that have long urged the government to grant relief from foreign competition.
The president's action, which initiates a challenge to imports and could result in higher tariffs on foreign-made steel within months, goes beyond any protections that the Clinton administration offered the industry and is certain to raise tensions with trading partners.
Administration officials said the decision came after a detailed study of the steel industry's woes. They described the once mighty steel sector - with only a fifth as many workers as in 1980 - as hobbled by an unending glut of imports from South Korea, Taiwan, China, Brazil, Germany, Russia, Ukraine and many other nations that often produce steel for less than their American competitors....
Mr. Bush's commitment to pursue a trade case before the International Trade Commission, an independent United States agency that adjudicates trade disputes, does not guarantee the industry that it will be granted relief. The trade commission must decide whether steel producers have suffered injury because of a sudden import surge. Only then would Mr. Bush have leeway to impose remedies....
Mr. Bush announced the step before the administration had completed the details of its case, including which steel products would be included in what is known as a Section 201 investigation under the 1974 Trade Act. Administration officials said privately that the timing was dictated by the fact that Democrats took control of the Senate this week.
Led by Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat of West Virginia , Democratic leaders had made clear that they would use their control of the Senate - the first time they have controlled the body since 1994 - to order the trade commission into action if the administration did not take the step first.
Administration officials said today that the matter had been under study for several months by the Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill; the commerce secretary, Donald L. Evans; and Robert Zoellick, the United States trade representative. They found that the industry suffered heavily in 1998, when the currencies of emerging-market nations collapsed one after the other and steel imports spiked to new highs, the officials said. Though imports have since receded, the industry's finances have not recovered, they argued....
[The full article is available at <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/06/business/06STEE.html>.] *****
At bottom, protectionism of rich imperial nations has seldom anything to do with labor standards. It's just an opportunistic politics of cross-class alliance of employers & employees on an industry basis (not even on a national basis). You can't raise labor standards of poor nations by restricting imports from them, unless you are supporting specific boycotts called for by labor organizers of poor nations.
Yoshie