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Will action follow?
By Paul Shearon
Anger over high unemployment, job outsourcing, Wall Street bailouts, and the budget deficit drove the outcome of the 2010 election. Voters tossed dozens of incumbents out of office and sent an army of fresh faces to Washington, D.C., all promising change in small and large ways.
Will the newly elected candidates help solve the problems that generated voter anger in the first place, or just make them worse?
There’s reason to be skeptical. Rather than insisting on fair trade policies that stand up for American companies and workers, candidates across the country who ran against the record of the Obama administration largely oppose efforts in Congress to close loopholes in the U.S. tax code that encourage job outsourcing, address unfair foreign trade practices, or that support small businesses struggling to market their goods and services overseas.
Now that they’re elected, will they stand idly by while our trading partners violate existing trade agreements and steal our best jobs?
The new Congress faces a serious test of its fair trade bona fides in an ongoing battle over illegal European aerospace subsidies that threaten U.S. jobs. Over the last three decades, Europe provided billions of subsidies to France-based aerospace giant Airbus to steal tens of thousands of American jobs from U.S. workers.
Airbus is now attempting to win a $35 billion Pentagon contract to build Air Force refueling tankers with the help of $5 billion of the illegal subsidies. If they’re successful, more than 50,000 American jobs that would be supported by a U.S.-built tanker will head overseas to France, Germany and Spain. In Ohio alone, that would mean the loss of almost 700 jobs.
Bipartisan coalition
In Congress, a broad bipartisan coalition of leaders from across the country has gone on record demanding that Airbus stop using illegal subsidies to get a leg-up on American workers.
The newly elected Congress now must prove that it can do better: create jobs, stimulate the economy, promote fair trade, and make good on a slew of other campaign promises. Ensuring that American workers in Ohio get a fair shot at the Air Force’s tanker contract should be a top priority.
Shearon is Secretary Treasurer of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), which represents over 80,000 professional and technical workers in the private and public sectors in the U.S. and Canada.