Election 2016: Members Speak Out
Cameron Redd
Local 7686
Cameron Redd, 48, of Portageville, Mo., is vice president of USW Local 7686, where he has been a member for 14 years. His employer is Noranda Aluminum.
“Trade is a huge issue. They call it free trade. It is not free trade. It cost us our jobs. China was allowed to dump all this aluminum on our market. We have 830 members laid off. I myself am laid off. You map out your kid’s college. But because of this, you don’t know what will happen.
“For the first time in my life I bought a new car for myself a couple of years ago, then I got laid off, so I started cutting back. I traded down, cut down on cable, and so on. There are a lot of people who had to make some hard choices, even about whether they could stay in that community. Some had to move to other states.
“Trump makes all of his stuff overseas. If he wanted to create jobs, he has had the opportunity to do that for a long time. There is what he says and what he did. Now all of a sudden he wants to be president and he says he is going to bring jobs back, but all of his stuff is made someplace else.
"I hope Americans do not fall for that. He is an off-shorer. He has gone so far as to bring foreign workers in to work on some of his projects. If he wanted to create jobs here, he could have manufactured his products here.
“I don’t harbor ill will toward people who make a lot of money. It is just when they get too greedy and take their company to a place with forced labor and slave labor and bring products back here and sell them for the same price and hoard up all that money for themselves.
“A Trump presidency will set us back decades, literally decades, so I have to come out against it.”
