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Brown, Ryan lead rally against Pacific trade deal
LORDSTOWN
Members of United Auto Workers Local 1112 crowded into their union hall Saturday to hear their congressional representatives blast a trade agreement they say is unfair and on a fast track for passage.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, argue U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-13th, needs more scrutiny before Congress votes on it.
No one can possibly know everything that’s in the agreement, which is hundreds of pages long and kept in a secure room, Brown told the crowd.
Brown said he has seen the damage done by unfair trade agreements, citing NAFTA as one.
Fast-tracking TPP, he said, will lead to another bad agreement.
Brown said that five years after NAFTA, he flew to the Mexican border and crossed to neighborhoods where Mexican auto workers lived.
“Their homes were constructed of packing material and cardboard boxes,” he said.
“A ditch behind the neighborhood was full of industrial waste.”
“I went to an auto plant. It was clean and modern.”
“There was one difference. There was no parking lot. They couldn’t afford to buy the cars they were making.”
One of the problems with the trade agreements, Brown said, is that they allow companies to take advantage of depressed wages, worse working conditions and weaker labor laws in other countries to exploit workers while at the same time shutting down factories in the U.S. and putting the American middle class out of work.
Darryl Parker, president of USW Local 1375, talked about how the loss of RG Steel in Warren in 2012 hurt “1,100 lives.”
Steel plants used to be able to recover in downturns, he said, by reducing schedules and workforce.
“When you have these trade agreements, and they can go right to the shores and get steel they want.”
“When you have bad trade agreements that with the stroke of a pen you can change 1,100 lives,” he added.
“You have China, a currency manipulator,” he continued, “a bad trade agreement and corporate greed, and I’m a casualty.”
It isn’t only people, but communities that can suffer when a plant shuts down, Ryan pointed out.
“What happens when you lose a plant?” he said. “What happens to cities’ budgets?”
“What happens to the mental-health levy, the school levy, the library levy, the 20 bucks you throw in the basket at church? That all goes away.”
“You’ve got to make something,” he said. “You’ve got to produce something. We’re losing the driver of the economy.”
He urged union members to encourage membership among younger people and to vote.
“We have to start organizing again,” he said. “The unions didn’t create themselves.”
“Enough is enough,” he continued. “You can have the corporate jets and the agreement in a secret room, but at the end of the day, you’re going to go on a ballot, and we’re going to vote.”
Tim Burga, president of Ohio AFL-CIO, said that union members will meet April 18 at the union hall in Niles for a door-to-door canvass.
He also encouraged a letter-writing campaign to U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio.
“He’s voted for every unfair trade deal,” Burga said.