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Strategies & Market Trends : Commodities - The Coming Bull Market

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To: craig crawford who wrote (772)	9/5/2001 4:00:28 AM
From: craig crawford	Read Replies (1) of 1643

SOURCE: United Steelworkers of America Is Labor Day Being Devalued? By Leo W. Gerard, USWA International President biz.yahoo.com Friday August 31, 12:49 pm Eastern Time Tire companies use their multinational standing to beggar the contracts of unionized workers in the developed world with the repressed conditions imposed on emerging economies. And aluminum companies idle workers in the Pacific Northwest in order to profit from the sale of low-rate energy that public policy originally granted them in order to stimulate production and employment. But nowhere is the hypocrisy of today's environment more apparent than in the crisis that so-called ``free trade'' has imposed on workers in the American steel industry, where prices collapsed during the Asian financial crisis, and have never recovered. Twenty-three steel companies have gone into bankruptcy since the Asian crisis -- five of them since July -- with more undoubtedly to come. The advocates of unrestrained global trade attribute the crisis to some mythical ``inefficiency,'' apparently oblivious to the fact that American steelworkers have raised productivity 180 percent over the past 20 years, have encouraged their companies to invest $60 billion in modernization, and produce steel for fewer man-hours per ton than workers anywhere in the world. .............................................................................................................................. In fact, America suffers from a competitive disadvantage globally because we're the only country that has surrendered 25 percent of our market to our trading partners. We're the only one that allows our trading partners to dump steel illegally in our market at below the cost of production. And we're the only society that requires the private sector to bear the cost of retiree health care coverage. In every other steel-producing country, these costs are subsidized by government in one fashion or another. As a result of these perversions in the so-called ``free market,'' more than 25,000 steelworkers have been driven out of work and 600,000 steelworker retirees and their surviving dependents are at risk of losing their health care coverage should the industry suffer further contraction or collapse.

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