Contact: Gary Hubbard, 202-256-8125, ghubbard@usw.org
Pittsburgh (July 21, 2016) ) – Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers (USW), confirmed today’s final duty orders by the U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC) on imports of cold-rolled steel from Brazil, India, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
Gerard said: “Today’s final duty orders by the Obama Administration expands fairer pricing conditions on cold-rolled steel products from five countries, combined with duties placed earlier this summer on the same steel import products from China and Japan.”
He noted the duties by law will remain in effect for five years to address predatory dumping, or selling below cost in order to gain market share and injure domestic producers.
The USW said the cold-rolled steel trade case enforcement action will come as good news to steelworkers among 16 steel making facilities that make the product in the industrial states of Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Kentucky and the taconite miners on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota.
“We have nearly 19,000 steelworkers and iron ore miners still on extended layoff status since last year as the remaining steel trade case investigations continue to reduce huge inventories of unfairly dumped and subsidized finished steel imports that have been stockpiled before the case was initiated,” the USW president emphasized.
Tom Conway, USW International Vice President, who participated in the trade case hearings and leads steel sector bargaining, said: “The year-long investigation and duty orders show our trade laws need a rewrite in today’s world of steel overcapacity that’s putting American manufacturing workers and miners on layoff in their our own market, while foreign producers keep shipping illegally-subsidized and dumped products.”
The cold-rolled petition was filed at the beginning of last July – but industrial workers still face massive imports of other subsidized and dumped products. Pipe and tube producers and workers are suffering severe job losses. China’s overcapacity in steel, aluminum, paper and many other products continue to damage world markets, undermining jobs and wages.
“While we will persist in fighting for every job, a comprehensive approach to trade policy is what’s really required,” Gerard said. “Winning a trade case means we have to ‘lose’ first. This says we have to experience injury in the form of permanently lost jobs and shuttered facilities to qualify for relief. Unfortunately, many lives and communities are then shattered in the process.”
Gerard further declared, “New trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), will only make things worse. The TPP fails to impose disciplines on currency manipulation,” he said.
“The proposed trade deal also fails to address overcapacity and would actually allow Vietnam’s plans to build substantial new capacity in steel, while protecting from review any state subsidies put in place prior to the agreement’s effective date. What’s worse, Vietnam was granted 13 years of tariff protection to enable all of this to occur.”
According to the U.S. government’s determination, antidumping (AD) and countervailing (CVD) duties for cold-rolled steel exports by producers in each country are:
- Brazil --14.35 to 35.43 percent (AD); 11.09-11.31 percent (CVD).
- India -- 7.60 percent (AD); 10.00 percent (CVD).
- Russian -- 13.36 percent (AD); and 6.95 percent (CVD).
- South Korea – 6.32 to 34.33 percent (AD); 3.91 to 58.36 percent (CVD).
- United Kingdom -- 5.40 to 25.56 percent (AD).
The American petitioner companies in the cold-rolled steel products case are: ArcelorMittal USA LLC, United States Steel Corp., AK Steel Corp., Nucor Corp., and Steel Dynamics, Inc.
The USW represents 850,000 workers in North America employed in many industries that include metals, rubber, chemicals, paper, oil refining and the service and public sectors.