UAW President Shawn Fain and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond called for trade policies Thursday that improve the lives of workers and benefit their communities rather than force a “race to the bottom” through deals that boost the fortunes of wealthy people at the expense of others.
The labor leaders spoke in Detroit to trade officials from countries including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Chile, among others, as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in a session moderated by U.S. Trade Rep. Katherine Tai.
Fain, whose union represents about a million active and retired members, said trade policies have not been kind to working-class Americans.
“Anti-worker trade policy has been the single biggest source of damage to working-class people in our country over the last 40 years,” Fain said. “I’ve watched how plant closings destroyed families, they destroyed communities.”
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Corporate greed and trade policies that aren’t focused on workers, rather than technological advances, were actually to blame, he said, asserting that the Detroit Three, for instance, had made a quarter of a trillion dollars in profits in the last decade while continuing to close plants.
He described how General Motors had closed its Lordstown Assembly Plant in 2019 and later reopened a joint venture to produce electric vehicle batteries nearby, driving wages down in the process from $32 an hour to $16.50 an hour to start. Jeep- and Chrysler-parent Stellantis, he noted, had also idled its Belvidere Assembly Plant this year, leaving the community there reeling.
Workers have little choice but to uproot themselves and take jobs elsewhere or opt for retirement in many cases, he said.
Union leaders and their members don’t have an issue with companies making money, but with estimates that 26 individuals control as much wealth as half of the global population, balance is needed, Fain said, describing that level of inequality as criminal.
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Fain and Redmond, who both described the positive impact that good union jobs had on their personal and family trajectories, pushed back against the notion that unions are opposed to companies making money or that they are anti-trade. Trade policies, however, need to be fair.
“Here in America, free trade deals, they had a disproportionately negative impact on communities and particularly workers of color. These trade deals, they gutted communities, and they really deepened inequality in this country amongst workers,” said Redmond, whose union represents 12.5 million members. “We have the opportunity to reverse the damage through trade policies with workers at the center.”
But worker-centered trade policies, with strong protections for worker rights, don’t mean sacrificing profits, which Redmond said is a misunderstanding in the business community.
Tai emphasized that, the Biden administration wants to focus trade policy on workers.
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“For too long, our trade policies have been focused on liberalization, efficiencies, lowering costs to the exclusion of other goals,” she said, noting that while that has produced benefits, it has also been accompanied by widening inequality and “significant displacements.”
Other outcomes are possible, she said.
“We want to use trade as a force for good, a race to the top for our workers and for their working conditions,” said Tai, who noted in her comments the impact of the labor rights enforcement mechanism that was included in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement when it was negotiated. That mechanism has provided an avenue to address worker complaints in Mexico involving U.S. automakers and suppliers.
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