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Backdrop of prosperity takes edge off crisis
Friday, February 19, 1999 By Steve Massey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
There were the appropriate displays of indignation and frustration about the unfairness of it all.
The domestic steel industry, after all, has spent the better part of two decades getting in fighting trim. Now it is being forced to watch steel pour in from Japan, Brazil and other countries in the past year at prices allegedly lower than producer costs
What's fair about that? the politicians, steel executives and union leaders wanted to know. How are we supposed to compete against that?
"This isn't some soybean crisis," U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat, said before the start of yesterday's Senate Steel Caucus hearing in Pittsburgh. "This is about the survival of an industry."
But for all the anguish inside the stately, wood-paneled courtroom, adorned by a painting of Pittsburgh during its steelmaking heyday and filled with men in dark suits, something was missing: community outrage.
Outside the U.S. Post Office and Courtroom building, where the hearing was held, it was business at usual. There were no protesters, no masses of angry families calling for a boycott of all things foreign.
In short, this was not the 1980s, when plant closings and layoffs by the thousands were a way of life in Western Pennsylvania, and "Buy American" and "Down with imports" rallies were commonplace.
"Back then, it was a time of heavy-duty layoffs. You could see and feel the impact, at the cash register, at the stores, at the bowling leagues," said Paul Lodico, co-coordinator of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, formed to help displaced workers get back on their feet. "Right now, it's more anticipation. There have been some layoffs, but so far, they've been pretty slight."
Of course, there's not nearly as many jobs at risk today as there used to be.
Twenty years ago, more than 130,000 toiled in the region's steel mills; today, fewer than 50,000 do. And those who have been laid off in recent months, ostensibly because of cheap imports, number in the hundreds, not thousands.
It's also hard to generate a real sense of crisis in an economy that, by many measures, is as good as it's been in a long while.
Local jobless rates range from a high of 6.7 percent in Fayette County to a low of 3.4 percent in Allegheny County, nothing close to the double-digits that characterized much of the 1980s. It's true many new jobs don't pay as well as the factory jobs that were lost, but a lot of them do.
"In the valley, we're in a long period of prosperity," Lodico said. "We have to go back a ways to find things this good."
Even the free-trade bogeyman, a favorite rallying point for the United Steelworkers and other unions, doesn't seem to carry the oomph it once did.
Although the USW says polls suggest a majority of Americans think free trade is not good for the country, the reasons for their concern have more to do with worker exploitation and the environment than for job loss.
"We started the anti-Nike campaign because of child labor," said Joel Joseph, chairman of the Made in the U.S.A. Foundation. The Washington, D.C.-based organization also is pushing for a food-labeling law to let consumers know if they're buying products from environmentally safe countries. "People want to know if their tomatoes contain [the insecticide] DDT," he said.
Joseph believes workers are still concerned about trade-related job loss, even if they are remaining silent on the issue. His foundation has teamed with the USW to try to overturn the North American Free Trade Agreement, claiming almost 200,000 jobs have been lost since the pact liberalizing trade between the United States, Mexico and Canada was approved.
But it's not clear if those job-loss claims resonate much with the average American. Only 470 Pennsylvanians have been granted assistance since July 1994 under a government program set up to help workers who lost their jobs because of Nafta, the state Department of Labor and Industry said. In the Pittsburgh region, the number is only 21.
In the same five years, U.S. exports to Mexico have doubled, to $79 billion. Based on estimates that each $1 billion increase in exports creates 10,000 to 20,000 jobs, that would suggest at least 400,000 U.S. jobs have been created since Nafta's passage, more than double the number the USW says have been lost.
There may be one more factor limiting the sense of outrage against Japan and Russia - sympathy. At a time the U.S. economy is humming along, Japan remains mired in a decade-long funk while Russia is on the verge of collapse. It's not easy to kick someone when they're down.
And unlike the early 1980s, it's not easy to point to Japan and Russia as the "bad guys."
In the interceding years, Japan has spent billions building automobile and electronics plants in the United States that employ tens of thousands, including nearly 3,000 at the Sony Technology Center in Westmoreland County. Russia is now an ally and no longer part of the "evil empire." And products that are "Made in the U.S.A." often contain foreign components, just as foreign products often contain U.S. parts.
Said Joseph: "The world has grown more complex."
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