By Zenitha Prince
AFRO Washington Bureau Chief
PITTSBURGH—Joe Brown was forced to watch the creeping malaise that infected his town after its steel mill closed down. The factory was the main economic engine of Beaver Falls, Pa.; it was where Brown worked every summer to earn money for college.
“It was THE economy in my hometown,” Brown said. “A lot of young people just left; a lot of my family [members] have left.”
That story has played out in towns and cities throughout the country, leaving hopelessness in its wake.
“There are a lot of bitter Pennsylvanians and Americans,” Brown said.
That bitterness has made the flagging economy a central issue of the presidential race between Republican nominee John McCain and warring Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And especially so in states like Pennsylvania, where manufacturing is the backbone of the economy—accounting for $73.9 billion of the state’s gross product—and where 207,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000, according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
Gangs have replaced families, old heads have replaced fathers and gang rituals and codes have replaced the church.
It is also why Obama and Clinton spoke at a forum on manufacturing and trade at the Donald Lawrence Convention Center here Monday. McCain declined the invitation.
Organizers said unfair trade practices by foreign countries, failed trade policies such as NAFTA and the unwillingness of government to enforce trade laws have all led to increased outsourcing and the decline of American manufacturing.
“We’re tired and frustrated and we’re angry and we need someone who’s going to stand up for fair trade,” United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard told a roomful of manufacturing employees, retirees, union and manufacturing executives.
Scott N. Paul, executive director of Alliance for American Manufacturing, said the issue defies labels since it affects everyone.
“This is not a labor or management issue; a Republican or Democratic issue; every American is concerned about manufacturing and voters demand answers,” he said.
The Alliance, along with co-sponsors United Steelworkers, SOAR, United States Steel, ATI, AK Steel and ArcelorMittal has targeted China as the chief offender—artificially manipulating its currency and subsidizing Chinese industries to lower prices and then dumping the cheap goods, some of which are made without proper safety and quality control oversight, into American markets.
And fight for good jobs will be waged not only in the rural towns of Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York, but in Black inner-city communities like those in Pittsburgh, a city synonymous with steel production for more than a century.
“Pittsburgh over the last 30 years has suffered more from the permanent loss of manufacturing jobs than any urban area; we’ve been devastated,” said Bill Robinson, an Allegheny County councilman. “Pittsburgh has one of the highest unemployment rates among African-Americans in the country. This has been a nagging problem for 20 to 25 years and no one has been able to figure out what to do.”
Blacks didn’t gain entry to manufacturing jobs in Pittsburgh until the agitation of the civil rights movement. In a system based on seniority, they were last hired and the first fired.
Rick Adams, co-convener of the Western Pennsylvania Black Political Assembly, said even those who kept their jobs were placed in jeopardy.
“You once had an opportunity to get a middle class lifestyle—to get a home, get your children into a good school,” he said. “When that went away, there wasn’t a replacement for these types of jobs. They either moved out of the city, and not everyone has a car, or were replaced with jobs that required higher education or more specialized skills.”
The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that the share of African-Americans working in manufacturing declined from 23.9 percent in 1979 to 9.8 percent in 2007, the highest drop of any group.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, the unemployment rate in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area rose to 4.9 percent in February. The national rate is 4.8 percent.
In Allegheny County, where 84 percent of Black Pittsburghers live, African-American men have significantly lower labor force participation rates, according to an Allegheny County economic trends report.
African-American men age 16 and over had an overall labor force participation rate of 58.9 percent in 2000, compared to 69.5 percent for White males. Consequently, the median household income for African-Americans was $22,130 or just 54 percent of the comparable median household income for Whites.
The impact of unemployment can be seen on street corners in Pittsburgh’s poor neighborhoods where the drug trade thrives.
“It’s easy to get into drugs when you’re unemployed,” said Diane Henderson, 56, whose son Richard Norris, was killed in a drug-related drive-by shooting near a public housing complex on Burrows Street.
It’s also easy to get into gangs, Adams added.
“Gangs have replaced families, old heads have replaced fathers and gang rituals and codes have replaced the church,” he said.
Unemployment’s devastating effect also can be seen in the 1,736 violent crimes committed in the city last year, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, and the flooding of juvenile detention centers like the one William T. Simmons oversees.
“My ‘no vacancy’ sign is always out. I’m tired of seeing them come,” said the former judge and director of Shuman Juvenile Detention Center.
He explained, “They have no hope because they look around they don’t see success. You can walk up and down Homewood (a Black enclave) and see dilapidated buildings, crack houses, people involved in crime – that does not engender hope.”
Pittsburgh’s economy is looking hopeful, however. The area has refashioned itself as a leader in IT technologies, the biomedical field and in education, given the five universities in the area.
Dr. Larry Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research, said taking advantage of these new opportunities will require some effort.
“People who are not skilled are going to have to make efforts to retrain,” he said.
Robinson, the Allegheny County official, said that is why he likes Sen. Obama’s emphasis on using community colleges to prepare the workforce for the demands of a globalized economy. Obama has said he would provide $4,000 tax credits that would make community college “completely free for most Americans” and would ensure that community college degrees matched the needs of local industry and national goals.
At the manufacturing forum, Obama said he would ensure the everyday worker has a say at the trade negotiation table where before “special interests had bought every chair.”
Other policy highlights mentioned include:
--Creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank of $60 billion to create jobs rebuilding roads, strengthening bridges, etc.
--Spending $150 billion over 10 years to create approximately 5 million “green-collar” jobs in the renewable energy sector
--Renegotiating NAFTA to include higher labor and environmental standards
--Revoking tax breaks for companies that outsource jobs and hold American and other companies that import goods produced overseas to tighter quality control standards
--Forcing China to stop artificially manipulating its currency by cutting off access to U.S. markets if necessary.
The last may be difficult because the Bush administration has run up a high debt with China to finance the “war on terror,” Obama said. “It’s very hard to argue with your banker.”
Clinton later presented her ideas to rebuild America’s manufacturing base:
--Appointing a trade prosecutor
--Telling Mexico and Canada that NAFTA must be retooled or the U.S. will pull out
--Doing full reviews of Section 301 petitions—complaints by unions or other groups of unfair trade practices
--Reviewing tax code and remove any provision that allows outsourcing
--Creating 5 million green collar jobs
--Cracking down on industrial espionage because “what China can’t buy from us, they steal from us”
--Making healthcare universal so that it can be “taken off the (union-management) negotiating table”
Both candidates also said they would make an effort to reinvest in the military industrial complex and bring the production of military gear, machinery and weapons back home.
To those facing the possibility of losing their jobs, this is not politics-as-usual.
“This is about the survival of a way of life as we know it,” said Patrick Hassey, chairman, president and CEO of ATI. “No country has maintained a strong middle class without strong manufacturing.”