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Baltimore Steelworker Invites Pres. Obama to Witness Results of Past Failed Trade Policies
For Immediate Release June 10, 2015
Baltimore Steelworker Invites Pres. Obama to Witness Results of Past Failed Trade Policies
AFL-CIO, USW Launches New Trade Ad
(Washington, DC) – A new ad from the AFL-CIO and USW highlights how the loss of manufacturing jobs due to bad trade policy over the past 30 years has hit African-American populations especially hard in cities like Baltimore. The video makes clear that the battle over Fast Track authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is not about politics: it’s about people like former steelworker Mike Lewis.
“One can’t help but be saddened. This was once called the ‘Beast of the East.’ We made the steel that went into the Golden Gate Bridge…” Lewis says in a video message to President Obama, while standing on the decimated site where he proudly worked for 32 years as a full-time crane operator. The dream of economic opportunities disappeared in August of 2012 when Mike and 2,100 of his steelworker brothers and sisters who permanently lost their jobs at the steel plant in Sparrows Point in Baltimore.
The union hall where workers came together for so many years in good times has been a food bank that many rely on to feed their families. The closing of the steel plant and other manufacturing plants started the economic downfall that many in the African-American community have not recovered from.
“We want the American people to know that bad trade policies have terrible consequences for workers. This battle isn’t about a political party, it’s about the thousands of people just like Mike Lewis who simply want a fair chance to earn a good living and put food on their table,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Mike has a simple message for the President: “President Obama, we welcome you to come to the site of what failed trade policies have brought, the devastation of this facility. Please come, please take a look at the devastation of three decades of failed trade policies.”
The ad will begin as an initial web buy with key targeted audiences and escalate based on the timing of the Fast Track trade fight.
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https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2012/05/25/six-reasons-why-the-sparrows-point-steel-mill-collapsed/
Maryland officeholders have played a crucial role in keeping Sparrows Point open, and steelworkers working, in the last two years.
Back in December, when the plant shut down, Gov. Martin O’Malley rallied to its aid and helped engineer relaxed credit terms by the bank consortium and a cash infusion by Cerberus.
Gov. O'Malley at a January press conference with RG Steel's John Goodwin announcing a cash infusion into Sparrows Point. (Photo by Mark Reutter)
The same thing had happened in 2010 when “Team Maryland,” as U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski liked to call her Democratic colleagues in the state, propped up The Point when Severstal was threatening to close the plant.
Politics again may come to the fore to save this company – the Obama White House does not want to face several thousand laid-off RG Steel employees voting in the battleground state of Ohio in November.
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Mark Reutter is the author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point – The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might. His website is a compendium of information on the steel industry and its movers and shakers.
If he can't smell the bullshit, stick his face in it. Brilliant!
