Bush's message to China: Help yourself to U.S. jobs

President Bush has sent a message to China that has devastating consequences to thousands of American workers today and potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of others in years to come.
Facing a Dec. 31 deadline to act on a recommendation by the International Trade Commission that limits be placed on the import of Chinese pipe to the United States, the president spoke. Bring it on, he told China. Ship pipe to the United States until your government-subsidized pipe industry is straining to keep up.
The president's action was a slap at U.S. workers and at representatives and senators from both parties who asked him to support the domestic pipe industry over China's pipe producers.
The president's action also raises questions of whose interests he is attempting to protect and why he has consistently refused to use a law that Congress passed in 2000 to protect American industries from dramatic surges in Chinese imports. Five times the president has had the opportunity to impose import restrictions under the law, and each time he has refused.
Close to home
This time, Bush's refusal hits home in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys, where hundreds of steelworkers who produce standard pipe -- the kind used in plumbing, sprinkler systems, air conditioning and fencing.
Two area companies -- Wheatland Tube Co. and Sharon Tube Co. -- were among seven producers that filed the trade complaint. Wheatland Tube, the industry's largest U.S. producer, already has laid off 250 of its 1,000 workers in Wheatland, Sharon and Warren. Other workers have had their hours cut. A company official has said that Wheatland may have to close one of its plants if quotas weren't imposed.
None of that impressed the president. He disallowed the possibility that restricting Chinese pipe imports might create work for Wheatland's employees. His rationale was that if he restricted Chinese imports, other countries would fill the gap.
Four years ago, China sent about 9,000 tons of standard pipe to U.S. markets. Last year, that amount had increased nearly 40-fold The ITC recommended that China be held to 160,000 tons, which is still 20 times what was being imported in 2001.
If these numbers don't qualify as import-export surges that Congress anticipating having to control, nothing does.
What's next?
And that brings us back to the first paragraph of this editorial.
The president's action spells trouble for the U.S. standard pipe industry, which will affect thousands of workers and their families. But more dangerously, the president's refusal to even attempt to limit China's desire to flood the U.S. standard pipe market sends a message to China that any segment of the U.S. industrial base is open to attack.
Other U.S. producers of steel and anything made of steel should be very afraid of what will come next.
This time, thousands of Chinese workers will continue to toil for Third World wages while Ohio and Pennsylvania steelworkers join unemployment lines. But other areas should worry about which of their workers will lose their jobs to Chinese imports next year and the year after.
And every American should worry about what this country will be like when its industrial base crumbles under the weight of cheap, subsidized imports.