Headline News
Feckless ‘Factoryless Goods’ Proposal Meets Its Demise
The Teamsters and other labor and consumer allies, with the help of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, stood up to efforts to count goods manufactured overseas by U.S. companies as “Made in America”. And we won.
The federal government announced late last week that it was delaying the implementation of a proposal that would have classified U.S. producers of “factoryless goods” manufactured abroad as American products for trade purposes. The move would have distorted U.S. job and trade data and caused thousands more jobs in this country to be offshored.
Officials reneged on the effort after some 26,000 Americans submitted comments opposing the administration’s proposal. It is a victory for workers in the ongoing battle against shady trade practices championed by big business. The corporate class wants to change how manufacturing is classified because it would boost sagging U.S. trade deficit numbers and would help with efforts to get Congress to approve even more bum trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
As Teamster General President James P. Hoffa said last month, “The only reason you would classify an iPhone made in China as an U.S. export is to hide the size of our massive trade deficit.”
The factoryless goods proposal, designed by the Economic Classification Policy Committee, would have also falsely increased the reported number of U.S. manufacturing jobs as white-collar employees in firms like Apple. This shift would have also lead to a deceptive hike in U.S. manufacturing wages and output.
In waving the white flag, federal officials admitted that the public outcry significantly influenced its decision, and that it needs “an opportunity to perform additional research, testing and evaluation” of the proposal before going forward. Thus, the planned policy change will not take effect in 2017 as originally planned.
The victory is a good one. But it is not the end of the problem. In fact, it is really only the beginning. With the secretive TPP looming and consideration of fast-track trade promotion likely to come up after the November election, hard-working Americans need to remain vigilant.
The battle over trade is multi-layered and increasingly complicated. That’s for a reason – to dull the public’s senses over what is important and reduce the debate to just background noise. But workers can’t let themselves be deceived. Whether it’s an effort to sandbag the “Buy American” federal procurement program or allow dangerous food and products into the U.S. under TPP, it needs to be stopped.