Carpenters- "Chinese Trade Policies Taking our Jobs"

Members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters want President Barack Obama and Congress to call out China for currency manipulation that has cost millions of U.S. jobs in the last decade. In a March 31 letter to all U.S. Council Delegates, union General President Doug McCarron asked the UBC’s half-million members to work to combat this practice and replace it with fair-trade policies. Chinese currency manipulation has "hurt every member of our union and every worker in the United States. The current economic downturn has only made those effects worse," General President McCarron wrote in his letter to the delegates, the union's elected front-line leaders. He encouraged them to contact the White House and their congressional representatives prior to an upcoming report by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on exchange rate issues. Labeling China a “currency manipulator,” would be the first step in restoring fairness to U.S.-China trade relationship, General President McCarron said in the letter, which cited a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute that says 2.4 million U.S. jobs were lost between 2001 and 2008 because of Chinese monetary manipulation and other unfair trade practices. Unlike most world currencies, China’s renminbi does not fluctuate freely against the dollar. So while the renminbi should increase as China exports more goods, it instead remains artificially low, undervalued at up to 40 percent. As a result, China sells goods at prices that are almost impossible to compete with, destroying American manufacturing jobs. This manipulation also acts as a tariff on U.S. exports to China and other countries. In addition, China’s disregard for labor rights has suppressed its workers’ wages, thereby also artificially subsidizing exports. “It’s heartening to see the members of the Carpenters Union standing up for what’s right,” said Robert E. Scott, an Economic Policy Institute economist and author of the briefing paper on currency manipulation. “The U.S. government needs to know that its citizens understand this issue and are prepared to take action at the ballot box if this job-stealing situation isn’t addressed.” Scott’s report includes figures through 2008, the last year for which information is available. Since then, the American economy has struggled while China’s has boomed, causing even more job losses in the United States, Scott said. “Our skewed trade relationship with China contributed to the severity of the recession. China has taken advantage of the downturn to increase its share of U.S. non-oil imports from 69 percent in 2008 to 80 percent in 2009,” Scott said in an interview. The story is much the same in Canada, which, between 2001 and 2008, saw its trade deficit with China increase five-fold, from $7.6 billion to $40 billion. According to Scott, “China’s beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies have cost 300,000 Canadian jobs in the last decade.” The U.S. trade deficit with China was $226.8 billion in 2009, bringing to nearly $2 trillion the U.S.-China trade gap since 1999. At a March 12 event sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., business leaders and top economists detailed how Chinese currency manipulation hurts the U.S. economy and how U.S. policy needs to change on this issue. At the event, C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that there was “widespread recognition that currency manipulation equates protectionism” and that the U.S. has adopted a policy of “exporting unemployment.” Another panelist, Nobel Prize winning-economist Paul Krugman, has estimated that “for the next couple of years Chinese mercantilism may end up reducing U.S. employment by around 1.4 million jobs.”