Schumer: Feds are currently listing flatware and other products made by companies as ‘American-Made’ when they are actually produced overseas, putting companies that manufacture in the U.S., like Sherrill Manufacturing in Central, NY, at a disadvantage. Senator pushes feds to review ‘Made in America’ listings and immediately remove companies that are falsely listed. Read more
By closing loopholes in the Buy American Act, the 21st Century Buy American Act will increase demand for U.S. manufactured goods and create at least 60,000 to 100,000 U.S. jobs. Read more
Some firms have slowly been moving operations back to the U.S. Will the new TPP trade deal undo the progress? Read more
“American manufacturing is back!” breathlessly exclaim the ebullient cheerleaders in locales such as Forbes and the Boston Consulting Group. But while U.S. manufacturing may have bounced back slightly from Great Recession-lows, the reality is that America’s manufacturing recovery remains tenuous. On this National Manufacturing Day, policymakers can and should be doing much more to stimulate the growth and competitiveness of America’s manufacturing economy. Read more
Less than three months before China shocked markets with a surprise devaluation of its currency, a top Chinese exchange-rate official told a closed-door gathering that Beijing had no need for such a dramatic move. Read more
There are roughly 5.1 million fewer American manufacturing jobs now than at the start of 2001. And China is to blame for more than one-third of American jobs lost, says a new report. Read more
He said that maintaining a healthy domestic steel industry was also vital to the national security.
“We should be careful that a cost-analysis is done to make sure it takes into account jobs,” said Sweeney (D-Goucester), a vice president and general organizer with the International Association of Ironworkers union, whose members erect steel structures. “There are certain things this country has to have to protect ourselves and to be able to produce steel is very important.”
As with all bills that would impose restrictions on the Port Authority, identical legislation to Sweeney’s measure (S-2061) must also be adopted in New York State. He said he was still seeking a New York counterpart.
If Sweeney’s measure becomes law, it would apply to many of the projects slated under a $27.6 billion 10-year capital plan approved by the Port Authority in February.
The use of foreign steel in public projects became an issue in the region last year, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority allowed Chinese steel to be used for work on the Verrazano-Narrows and Bayonne Bridges.
Critics of Chinese-made steel, including the United Steelworkers union, complained that U.S. producers could not compete with mills in China, which pay workers as little as $15 a day and benefit from legal and financial support from the Chinese government. China is by far the world’s leading steel maker.
Sweeney said his legislation was prompted by a Star-Ledger article on the controversy in September.
The contractor for the Bayonne project, a partnership of Oklahoma-based Kiewit and the Swedish construction giant Skanska, eventually decided to use Italian steel instead of Chinese, along with some American steel.
The U.S. government already requires domestic steel to be used on public projects
that receive federal funds, and Sweeney said his bill would unburden those who pay bridge tolls by ensuring that Port Authority projects were eligible for those funds.
As in the rest of the country, steel manufacturing has been in decline in New Jersey for decades, and only a handful of operations remain, including MRP LLC in South Plainfield, which has supplied steel beams for the World Trade Center site, and a plant in Sayreville run by Gerdau Ameristeel.
The Port Authority declined to comment specifically on Sweeney’s bill. However, agency officials noted that the $1.5 billion Goethals Bridge replacement project is subject to a federal requirement that 99.9 percent of materials be produced domestically, while the agency’s own request for proposals on a $3.6 billion replacement of the Central Terminal Building at LaGuardia Airport calls for at least 51 percent domestic materials.
Daniel J. Ikenson, a trade policy specialist at the Cato Institute, said Sweeney’s measure was a misguided appeal to patriotism that would inflate the cost of public projects.
“It’s just common sense,” Ikenson said. ” Only a rudimentary understanding of supply and demand is needed to see that limiting competition for state procurement ensures that taxpayers get a smaller bang for their tax bucks.”
Last fall the agency said that it allowed the use of Chinese steel to expedite the Bayonne project, which is intended to allow larger container ships to reach terminals in Newark and Elizabeth once an expansion of the Panama Canal is completed next year.
But Sweeney rejected the notion that domestic steelmakers lacked the capacity or speed needed in such situations.
“This isn’t that hard to figure out,” Sweeney said. “If you know you’re going to build a bridge, you contact steel manufacturers in the United States and you say, I’m going to need this may tons of steel.’ They can do it.”
For the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America. They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all, but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.
“What kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo—a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school—I can say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck Thompson in Better off Without Em.
Comparisons with the Democratic Republic of Congo are not that far-fetched given the results of a recent report by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which is the first comprehensive survey of the skills adults need to work in today’s world, in literacy, numeracy and technology proficiency. The results are terrifying. According to the report, 36 million American adults have low skills.
It gets worse. In two of the three categories tested, numeracy and technological proficiency, young Americans who are on the cusp of entering the workforce—ages 16 to 24—rank dead last, and is third from the bottom in numeracy for 16- to 65-year-olds.
The United States has a wide gap between its best performers and its worst performers. And it had the widest gap in scores between people with rich, educated parents and poor, undereducated parents, which is exactly what Third World countries look like, i.e. a highly educated super class at the top and a highly undereducated underclass at the bottom, with very little in the middle.
The report shows a relationship between inequalities in skills and inequality in income. “How literacy skills are distributed across a population also has significant implications on how economic and social outcomes are distributed within the society. If large proportions of adults have low reading and numeracy skills, introducing and disseminating productivity-improving technologies and work-organization practices can be hampered; that, in turn, will stall improvements in living standards,” write the authors of the report.
There is a defined correlation between literacy, numeracy and technology skills with jobs, rising wages and productivity, good health, and even civic participation and political engagement. Inequality of skills is closely correlated to inequality of income. In short, our education system is not meeting the demands of the new global environment, and the outlook is grim, given the Right’s solution is to further defund public education while ushering kids into private schools and Christian academies aka “segregation academies.” The Republican-controlled South is where you see the Right’s education strategy in action. “Inspired by home-school superstars such as Creation Museum founder Ken Ham, tens of thousands of other southern families have fled their public-school systems in order to soak their children in the anti-intellectual sitz bath of religious denial.” In other words, we’re dumb and getting dumber.
While charter schools aren’t unique to the South, conservative states tend to respond most enthusiastically to their message, which makes Republican-controlled states ground zero for the further degradation of public education. The U.S. will likely continue to poll like countries like Indonesia and Tanzania, rather than Japan and Sweden when it comes to meeting the demands of a global economy.
Despite their hype and profits, study after study show that kids in charter schools perform no better on achievement tests than kids in public schools. But the correlation between a strong public education system and social mobility is demonstrated clearly in the OECD report. A 2006 report by Michael A. McDaniel of Virginia Commonwealth University showed that states with higher estimated collective IQ have greater gross state product, citizens with better health, more effective state governments, and less violent crime. In other words, were we to invest more in public education, we’d be instantly more intelligent, healthy, safe, and financially sound.
“The principal force for convergence [of wealth] — the diffusion of knowledge — is only partly natural and spontaneous. It also depends in large part on educational policies,” writes Thomas Piketty in his 700-page bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century . In other words, if we really want to reduce inequality, and if we really want to be a global leader in the 21st century, we need to invest more into our education system, which requires the federal government to ensure the rich and the mega-corporations pay their share. But we need to act now.
