LABOR, DEMS PUSH NEW, BIGGER LEGISLATIVE
PACKAGE ON REVITALIZING U.S. MANUFACTURING
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (PAI)—Organized labor and congressional Democrats are pushing a new, bigger package of legislation to help revitalize U.S. manufacturing, after a previous effort – which was more to score political points – failed in the last Congress.
But while the House approved last year’s batch of bills, including calling for federal reports on the state of U.S. manufacturing, this year the Senate is expected to be more receptive, and the Senate Commerce Committee welcomed Steel Workers President Leo Gerard to discuss the issue in a May 11 hearing.
“American manufacturing is in dire circumstances and its future is in jeopardy,” Gerard told senators. “The economy remains fragile and uncertainty reigns. Unemploy-ment, underemployment, wage stagnation, foreclosures all paint a grim picture of an economy still struggling to recover. For manufacturing communities, this recession has been just one more big wave in a decade of economic tsunamis that devastated workers, employers and communities.
“The decade-long decline of the manufacturing base is a crisis that undermined our economic security and is a direct threat to our national security. The question is: ‘What has happened to that prosperity and security and what must we do to strengthen the nation’s industrial base?’ The erosion of America’s manufacturing base is a clear and present danger.”
When House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., unveiled the manufacturing package the week before, USW said “we need to invest trillions in the coming decades to build a 21st century infrastructure and we must ensure that we actually make the technology and materials for the things we are building and installing.”
U.S. “technical, innovative and industrial capacities are essential to our economic and national security,” Gerard explained on May 11. The health of manufacturing and of defense industry is “inextricably linked” and both “are in critical condition,” he added, citing an AFL-CIO-commissioned detailed report issued two weeks before.
Manufacturing is in decline due to a combination of trade, tax, investment, procurement policies and the globalization of production, he pointed out. “The failure to have a national manufacturing strategy helped create this situation,” Gerard said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way. We must act now with strategic and employment linked policies, investments and incentives to revitalize our manufacturing base.”
The latest package is a continuation of a longtime theme by both labor and the Democratic Obama administration. Both argue that new, high-paying U.S. jobs can be created – especially needed in a time of continuing high unemployment – by focusing U.S. factories on “clean energy” products.
“Rebuilding America's manufacturing base is central to rebuilding our economy,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka added.
“The ‘Make it in America’ agenda would finally create a national manufacturing strategy our country desperately needs. The United States has seen far too many good jobs go overseas. And it's not just the front-line manufacturing jobs that have vanished – it's design, R&D and engineering jobs as well,” he added.
Losing manufacturing, and the innovation it brings, undermines job opportunities and endangers national security, too, he added then. “Other nations are taking over production of our national defense technology while countries like China have access to and have made moves to limit the United States' access to the raw materials needed to guide a missile, drive an Abrams tank or build a hybrid or electric car.”
Key pieces of the new pro-manufacturing agenda include:
* National Manufacturing Strategy Act to have the executive branch “develop a national strategy to increase manufacturing.”
* Renewing and expanding a clean energy manufacturing program originally established by the stimulus law. The program, giving tax credits to firms for advanced energy manufacturing facilities, has already created 17,000 jobs and leveraged $5,4 billion in private-sector investment, says Rep. Steven Rothman, D-N.J., who’s pushing the expansion bill.
* A new surface transportation law, going beyond highways and mass transit to include high-speed rail and other infrastructure improvements. The package would also extend the “Build America Bonds” and create a National Infrastructure Development Bank to issue them.
The bank’s bonds would jump start key infrastructure projects, picked by a non-partisan panel, with the expectation those bonds would leverage private investment in key rail systems, broadband, airports and roads, thus creating jobs. The projects would have a domestic content requirement, Hoyer said.
“We need to be committed to making sound investments in our ability to out-educate, out-innovate and out-build our competitors so that we can create good middle class jobs and strengthen American competitiveness,” added Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who has pushed the infrastructure bank for years.
“We need to be a country that builds things again,” she added. “But with today's budget constraints, innovative financing solutions are needed. A National Infrastructure Bank would enable us to expand and enhance our existing infrastructure, and make critical investments in modern infrastructure needed to create good-paying jobs.”
* Making the R&D tax credit permanent “so research investments can draw capital that create tomorrow’s jobs.” “A significant part of” federal R&D dollars, another measure says, would go towards small businesses.
* The “Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act levels the trade playing field by holding accountable countries that create an unfair trade advantage by manipulating their currency.” The unnamed country in the law: China.
* Commerce Department block grants to “provide resources and strategies” to “small to medium-sized businesses in communities hardest hit by unemployment” to let them “retool and retrofit their operations and train their workforce, to transition to the
manufacturing of clean energy, high-technology, and advanced products.”
* Corporate tax reform. The package was vague on what that would look like, but both the Democrats and labor have said in the past that tax credits for creating jobs in the U.S. should expand, while tax credits for creating them overseas should be banned.
* Retooling job training programs, with the help of labor and business to ensure that retraining workers in places like community colleges and apprenticeships educates them in skills needed for jobs that industry actually demands and promises to provide.
* There would also be “incentives to encourage private investment in natural gas refueling infrastructure and production and purchasing of natural gas vehicles and trucks” and expansion of federal energy-efficient buildings programs. Making buildings more energy-efficient – and training workers to do so – would create thousands of building trades jobs, especially among Utility Workers and Electrical Workers.
* Legislation ordering a “preference to U.S.-made goods and materials in installation, replacement, and improvement of drinking water and wastewater infra-structure projects” and a ban on buying certain national security items made overseas.
* Ordering “federal contracting officers, government-wide, to solicit optional information regarding the impact a contract award may have on U.S. job creation and authorizes the use of this information in award decisions.” ###
