NAME: Ira Grupper
EMAIL: irag@iglou.com
DATE: 07/10/2009
TITLE: Buy America or bye, America?..
LABOR PAEANS—July - August 2009
by Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )
To Labor Paean’s email subscribers: A letter-writer done talked about my mama. That letter, and my response, both appear in the Louisville paper FORsooth, from whence also emanates the Labor Paeans newspaper column.
Below are the bad-talkin’ letter and my response, AND THEN my newspaper column, which also raised some hackles. Hope you have time to read it all.
Ira
The letter:
I am getting tired of the anti-business bias that you permit Ira Grupper to put in the paper. I understand that he was a union organizer. So was Dave Beck. We should not generalize. My first job in business was in 1935. He uses the term “greedy business” as a general description of business. In these many years I have observed that greedy corporations usually fail. The ethical succeed because we all want to do business with them.
We must be citizens of the world. “Buy America” campaigns do not serve the cause of world peace.
I have been a member of the FOR for some 50 years. Peace is good for business.
Lee Thomas
___________________________________________
Grupper’s reply:
Dave Beck was president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1952-1957. In 1959 he was convicted of income tax evasion and falsifying union tax forms, and served time in jail. Mr. Beck wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last, union official to have had a hand in the till. Truth be told, Beck spent his last years as a businessman--check it out.
Mr. Thomas writes: “…I have observed that greedy corporations usually fall. The ethical succeed because we all want to do business with them.” I hereby challenge Mr. Thomas to a public debate, perhaps sponsored by FOR, on ethical and unethical labor and business.
Among points I will raise: The issuance of (knowingly benefiting from) insurance policies during the slavery era by ACE USA, Aetna Life Insurance, New York Life, Penn Mutual Life, Providence Washington Insurance, and others.
How George Bush (the Younger’s) grandfather, a U.S. senator, helped Hitler’s rise to power; the relationship of National City Bank and Chase National Bank to Hitler’s Reichbank; the relationship of the former Big Three automakers, and GE, Kodak and Shell Oil, to Nazi Germany; and charges “philanthropist” Bill Gates stole DOS and defrauded Apple.
Mr. Thomas is right: “Peace is good for business.” But so is corruption, theft, war and genocide.
Ira Grupper
Buy America or bye, America? (4 activists’ views)
Your columnist has ignited a firestorm! In the June Labor Paeans we criticized the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers and others for organizing the “Keep it Made in America” national bus tour, which recently stopped in Louisville. We compared it to organized labor’s old "Buy American" campaign, a protectionist schematic that did nothing to show international working class solidarity, and did not keep companies from moving out of the U.S..
We received correspondence from three union officials: from the president of UAW Local 862 at the two Ford manufacturing plants here in Louisville, who has a different view than your columnist; a second, from a USW (Steelworkers) official, who thought we were really out of touch with reality. A third, from the head of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, agrees with yours truly. There was a fourth response, from an immigrant rights activist, which is also on the side of the angels (oh, I’m such an angel).
The part of your scribe’s remarks that aroused all the heartburn is this: “What is 'American'? Look under the hood of a Ford and you'll find parts from all over the world. Look at all the ‘foreign’ cars now being produced in the US. Should they not be purchased? How can you tell if a Toyota is made in the US or elsewhere? Toyota is not Japanese, or American. It is multi-national, part of a multi-national corporation, and the working class needs to fashion a multi-national, as opposed to a narrow-national, response.
“Make no mistake about it. Your columnist is very troubled by all the U.S. manufacturing jobs that have moved out of the country, including his own, leaving millions of U.S. workers unemployed. Yes, let’s support a return of U.S. manufacturing. But let’s not support a plan that feeds a narrow protectionist view that is doing the working class a disservice by pushing this campaign.”
We reprint below, verbatim, all four responses.
The first response comes from Rocky Comito, President of Local 862, UAW, which represents workers at Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant and Kentucky Truck Plant:
“Ira,
“If you look at the Auto industry, the ‘Keep it Made in America’ is reaching out to have a equal playing field with the foreign manufacturers. This is what we have always asked for. There are many reasons for this that ALL Americans should be for and now more than ever should understand the reasoning behind it. The profits of American Company vehicles go to America, is it a coincidense that all the towns, cities, states and America is in a budget crunch?? Where has our tax base gone??
“Why is it protectionism when America wants to limit things but not others? Example: Japan imports 8,000 Ford & 2,000 GM's and exports to America 2 million Toyota's and 1 million Honda's, the cost of the American vehicle in Japan is almost double the price in America! Is that fair?? Is that protectionism?? Japan "allows" only 6 % of their car market to be made of non Japanese manufactured vehicles. It's not only Japan, South Korea imported 9,000 U.S. cars but sold 800,000 cars in America. How about if these countries are only allowed to sell the same number of cars in the U.S. as they import into there countries?? O yea, that's protectionism! But, wouldn't that be fair?
“On American workers, (which contribute to the American taxes), in general, the Big 3 support more than twice as many U.S. jobs as the foreign automakers. More than 80% of the Big 3 vehicles sold here last year were made here, while only 50% of the foreign vehicles sold here were made here. The Big 3 car makers use more than twice the "domestic content " than foreign automakers. Even a Ford assembled in Mexico contains more U.S. and Canadian parts than a Hyundai assembled in Alabama or a BMW assembled in South Carolina. So the Big 3 sell half of the vehicles bought in the U.S. each year, but they purchase approximately three-fourths of the parts made here. Another item to look at, Research & Development, eighty cents of every dollar at Ford, GM & Chrysler gets spent in the U.S., probably the opposite at Toyota, and likely worst for the smaller foreign manufacturers. 1 in 10 of America's engineers and scientists involved in corporate R & D were employed by automakers and suppliers. One last issue, lets talk about health care, it's expensive to the U.S automakers because the U.S. doesn't have a health care system as many of the foreign countries do, which pays for or at least subsidizes their health care. If America had a health care system that was as affordable for employers and workers as the rest of the industrialized world, more than 80% of Detroit's North American losses in 2007 would have been wiped out, ( $2 billion by Ford & $3.1 billion by GM last year).
“The ‘Keep it Made in America’ is for the benefit of all American's, every day more and more jobs are being lost to lower wages, no benefits, poor working conditions and very few health & safety requirements. What happened to the American Dream?? Why bring America down, when we should be bringing everyone else up to America's standards?? Buy American - the job you save may be your own!!” (Note: Rocky sent, separately, a CNN piece, “Ford, Chrysler and GM’s contributions after 9/11,” but we do not have space to reprint. I.G.).
The second response comes from my old friend and staunch union sister, Gail Helinger:
“Greetings, Ira. We talked about this article at the single-payer health care seminar and I want to reiterate the thing that made me the most irate about your spiel and that is this charge of protectionism! That is the same bullshit (note: the editor changed “bullshit” to “bull”—IG) that multinational corporations and Big Business levelled at Organized Labor when they were trying to bulldoze NAFTA through during the Clinton administration!!! Those jerks actually fooled lawmakers and the president into believing that the unions were against it because we did not want workers in Mexico, for example, to enjoy the same standards of living as their U.S. counterparts. Now, go ask the thousands in the maquiladoras if NAFTA made their dreams come true. If most Americans bought products they knew were made in America and resisted paying a few cents less to get the made- in- China- specials at Wal-Mart, our economy might not be so far in the tank and could become stronger than China's. People, there are only two main powers in your possession: your voice (vote) and your money (especially where you choose to spend it!).
“LOVE&PEACE&SOLIDARITY, Gail Helinger, Recording Secretary of USW 1693 and Vice President of Derby City CLUW”
The third response comes from Bill Londrigan, President of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, who owes me a lunch and would rather hide out than reciprocate.
“Ira: I thoroughly enjoyed your column and find no issue with your position on the ‘Buy America’ effort. I think, like you, that the horse is out of the barn on that one. The only response for labor HAS to be global. Best wishes and good luck in Philly - Mississippi that is. Bill” (note: reference is to your columnist’s recent trip to Philadelphia, Mississippi to commemorate the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964—I.G.).
The final response comes from immigrant rights activist Stephen Bartlett:
“If a ‘Keep It Made in America’ campaign was done for the right reasons, I might have more sympathy for it. But I can't help thinking this will not be effective, nor is it appealing to the highest values of organized labor.
“First, it would be difficult to assert with a straight face that the corporations that produce automobiles, like most of globalization's mega-corporations, stil have any loyalty to the nation, state or city where they are presumably located. They will outsource just as fast as any transnational corporation owned by shareholders in Japan, Germany or Brazil; they will extort labor concessions just as fast as any corporation anywhere.
“Second, to lessen the impact of job losses and lowered wages for US based workers, we need a more comprehensive approach that would tip the power equation in favor of workers everywhere, over the capitalists who currently call the shots. We need a dramatic New Deal that would put employment and livable wages above the well being of corrupt banks, Wall Street hedgers or derivatives gurus. We need the re-impose taxes on the wealthy 5% of the populace, and encourage high labor and environmental standards across the world. We cannot swallow the fairy tale that so-called "patriotic" consumerism can turn the tide. If we want to shift the power equation, we need to empower workers, all workers, whether migrant, landless, hammered, displaced, thrown away, repressed, across all borders: do away with transnational trade agreements falsely dubbed "free trade", abolish the WTO, defend the rights of migrants and impoverished everywhere, not just within the borders of the U.S. Our government, and the corporations who so greatly influence our government, has imperial reach: only a globalized internationalist labor strategy can turn that tide.
“ciao, Stephen Bartlett, member of KITLAC (Kentuckiana Interfaith Taskforce on Latin America & the Caribbean)”.
We who support the basic fairness and humanity of a unionized workforce must know, when we look under the hood of a Toyota or a Ford, the percentage of parts that are made by union labor, and what is assembled by union labor, wherever it is made…And so, as the sun begins to set on the American Empire and U.S. manufacturing, replaced, for example, by Big Pharma’s push into selling to the Third World, we bid a fond adieu to the befouling American corporate stream, and a hearty welcome to-international-capital’s cesspool runoff.
Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com