http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020715&c=1&s=wypijewski
In the popular telling, however, a simpler narrative has predominated. As industry and union proclaimed in the 1970s, "The threat is real from foreign steel," a slogan that remains resilient in 2002. "While we have been playing by the rules, other countries have unfairly subsidized their industries, and we're paying the price," a Cleveland LTV worker said, reciting a common union argument in support of tariffs. Yet American steel has not been without government emoluments. In the time between the big shutdowns that began with Youngstown, numerous protections were applied to steel. Before Bush's action, 120 countervailing tariffs were in place, with forty more on application. Since 1977, the jobs disappeared anyway, more than 350,000 of them.
Outside the LTV bankruptcy hearings before the tariffs came down, Kim Shaffer, the wife of an LTV worker, expressed a considered impatience. At a meeting early in the crisis while a union rep was going on about unfair competition from foreign steel, she recalled, she had nudged her husband and whispered: "It's the same rhetoric we heard twenty years ago! What happened in all that time--did we get complacent? They're the same words coming out of different mouths." The same industry, the same union, the same region, the same scenario of shutdown, the same rhetoric. Where are the alternatives?
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...The space for action is always forty-five days or six months, maybe a year or more, but always in an atmosphere of imminent ruin. No wonder workers seize on the illusion of tariff relief and corporate saviors. It needn't have been so. A quarter-century ago, between 1977 and 1986, steelworkers and their allies began laying the road not taken, organizing for community/worker control of the mills. They formed the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley in Youngstown and the TriState Conference on Steel in Pittsburgh. In Youngstown, according to the activist and attorney Staughton Lynd, who argued in court for a community property right to industrial sites marked for abandonment, people were at the beginning of a learning curve, "and the USWA was to the right of the Catholic Church and the [conservative] Youngstown Vindicator...actively bad-talking what we were trying to do." In Pittsburgh, according to Charlie McCollester and Mike Stout, who were leaders in the TriState Conference, organizing communities around the possibilities of eminent domain, the USWA International softened its attitude but didn't make their work a priority. It gave lip service to universal healthcare--a natural issue, considering that health insurance is a major operating cost, with each active steelworker producing to support health and pension benefits of four retirees--but retreated from the demand along with the rest of organized labor in 1992-93. It has experimented piecemeal with employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, with varying degrees of success (for an interesting assessment of the record in Ohio, see The Real World of Employee Ownership, by John Logue and Jacquelyn Yates). But there has been no comprehensive vision, no long-range coordinated strategy.
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For the most part, it's not even about foreign steelworkers making $3 a day. The biggest exporter to the United States by product value is Canada, which is exempt from the tariffs under NAFTA. The tariffs come down hardest on Europe, South Korea and Japan. Although tariffs could be justified as a sanction against Russia and Ukraine for "subsidizing" steel by allowing workers to toil without pay for six months or longer, the political context of the crisis does not seem to have been part of the union's education efforts. How Russia got into its situation was not a subject among most workers I met. Nor was the origin of the 1997 Asian financial collapse, which resulted in currency devaluations throughout the region and aggressive steel production, even amid excess, to amass dollars. Nor even was America's failure to guarantee healthcare for all of its people, or the necessity, simply because steelmaking requires fewer and fewer workers, to imagine a shorter workweek without loss of pay, transitional income supports or guaranteed income, education and retraining that have a future, or occupations not yet dreamed of.
Most tariff opponents, from left to right, have been no more inspiring. Those who argue that America doesn't really "need" steel, like the editorialists who said Cleveland had grown out of it, discount all the complicated ways that need is constructed in towns and cities whose landscape and culture have grown up around the mills. Beyond that, like the steelworkers but in a different way, they trust in trade solutions. One leftish journalist who writes on these matters told me casually that it's nonsense for America to produce steel, that so long as there was some means of protecting the jobless, trade could insure a ready supply of the product and provide a redistributive benefit to poor exporters at the same time.
The problem is that the world is not a sodality of equal trading nations. Greater US dependence on steel imports, which currently account for about 20 percent of the market, would no more make it so than tinkering with the terms of trade. Among all the arguments I heard either to save steel or let it die, the clearest summation of the dialectic of power and production came from Charlie McCollester, who worked at Union Switch and Signal in Pittsburgh until its plant closed in 1986. "If you're a superpower and you don't produce things," he said, "then you need to control production. You need to control the market. Basically, you need to control the world, or try to. It comes down to imperialism."
For anyone who agrees with him but, like him, rejects the nativist position, the question, then, is produce for what? The world already has a glut of steel. "It's not so complicated really," says Kjeld Jakobsen, international relations secretary of the CUT, the Brazilian labor federation. "You need an industrial policy, and we need an industrial policy. We have a tremendous need for housing. We have almost no railroad. There is a big need for public transport. All of these things require steel. And you have similar needs. There is a market for everyone. The question is how can we help each other press our respective governments to develop national policies, which could involve a subsidy or not, to invest in social needs, local needs?"
Dennis Kucinich was sounding a similar note back in Cleveland. Although keen to political opportunity--the Congressman had stumped vigorously for tariffs--he said a long-term solution lay in changing the market for steel, creating a different kind of demand via a national industrial policy. "What you'd need," he said, pulling out paper and pen, "is a series of acts. First, let's call it the National Industrial Maintenance Act, which declares it the policy of the United States to maintain steel, automotive, aerospace, machine tools. Basically, it says if the private sector does not maintain investment in manufacturing capability, the public sector will have to. So you look at manufacturing almost as a utility. That addresses the ownership question." The rest of his list included an infrastructure act, already introduced as HR 1564, establishing a federal bank for financing rebuilding projects to the tune of $50 billion a year; a full-employment act; a national healthcare act; an act repealing sections of NAFTA and GATT that limit state economic interventions; an act to foster the development of new industries aimed at rebuilding the environment ("you could call it the National Employment and Ecology Sustainability Act"); an act to guarantee free college education and another to inspire creativity and the arts; a work-hour and living-wage act.
When he finished Kucinich said, "What does all of this get back to?" and on
the page he wrote NATION in large capitals, "one for all and all for one."
> From Brazil, Jakobsen looked past frontiers. Worldwide, the steel industry
is restructuring, and jobs are being lost. Worldwide, old patterns of
production are unsustainable socially and environmentally, and global trade
or financial regimes limit a people's options. Worldwide, there is talk of
solidarity, but a model of global unionism--as revolutionary a shift in
labor organizing as industrial unionism was from the craft guilds--has yet
to be developed. Worldwide, people need alternatives, better work, less
work, better services, more leisure, more say. "Obviously," he concluded,
"there is room for the big idea."