Contending that the American market is being flooded with tires imported from China, resulting in rampant plant closings and thousands of lost jobs, the United Steelworkers union (USW) is calling for import quotas.
According to a USW petition pending before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), imports of consumer tires from China increased by 215 percent in volume and 295 percent by value from 2004 to 2008.
The USW filing on behalf of its members employed in the U.S. tire industry was made under Section 421 of the Trade Act of 1974. The accompanying documentation highlights a huge surge of car and light truck tire imports from China.
The union represents about 15,000 tire workers employed at 13 plants in nine states, accounting for nearly half of the industry’s production capacity in 2008. The domestic tire industry consists of ten producers with 27 plants in 15 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Nearly 7,000 U.S. tire workers have been affected by six factory shutdowns since 2004. Some 1,000 tire plant employees face dismissal in the latest announced closure of the BFGoodrich plant in Opelika, Ala. Other significant domestic factory eliminations dating back to 2004 include Continental, Bridgestone Firestone and Goodyear.
“American workers are struggling to make it through the worst economic crisis in 80 years. Our tire industry is collapsing under the weight of 46 million Chinese tires entering our shrinking market annually,” says Leo W. Gerard, the USW’s international president.
“We are aggressively using America’s trade remedy laws to help workers and their employers combat an import surge from a country not playing by the rules,” he explains. “Section 421 is a tool to redress Chinese import surges that gets us through the current economic crisis and preserves a part of America’s industrial base.”
In 2008, China exported nearly 46 million consumer tires with a value of more than $1.7 billion to the U.S., making it the largest source of tire imports.
The petition pending before the ITC reports that these imports have nearly tripled by volume during the surge period while domestic production of consumer tires has declined by more than 25 percent.
The USW says it “seeks to combat this egregious trend by requesting the government to impose an import quota on China of 21 million consumer tires used on passenger cars, light trucks, minivans and sport utility vehicles per year.” The quota being sought would return China’s tire imports to the 2005 level, increasing 5 percent per year over a three-year period.
The petition maintains that this would improve domestic job security, enable U.S. tire makers to regain lost market share, increase production and sales and allow investment in capital equipment to better compete in the long term.
Section 421 of U.S. trade law was passed by Congress in 2000 to enable companies, groups of workers and other parties to seek relief when rapid increases in imports of certain products cause or threaten “market disruption” to a domestic industry.
“We believe the evidence strongly supports an affirmative outcome as a result of this import surge from China,” says Tom Conway, the USW’s international vice president and chairman of the union’s negotiating committee at Goodyear. “We need a quota imposed to reduce the artificial level of imports flowing from the distortions in the Chinese economy and the government’s manipulation of its currency.”
For more information, visit www.usw.org/tires/.
