After the president issued a budget last week slashing and burning environmental, labor and educational programs, the guy responsible for the thing, Mick Mulvaney, contended those financial massacres are the heart’s desire of the “steelworker in Ohio, the coal-mining family in West Virginia, the mother...
This month is the one-year anniversary of Alcoa closing the largest aluminum smelter in the United States – the Warrick in Indiana. More than 325 workers lost their family-supporting jobs, including Brandon Marshall, who, like most aluminum workers, was a member of my union, the United...
President Donald Trump met with a bunch of CEOs at the White House last week, prompting the same old, tired and untrue round of assertions that America lost millions of manufacturing jobs because of automation, regulation, illegal immigration and lack of education. The real culprit is...
Whirlpool, the big appliance manufacturer, stressed in recent years its preference to make it in America. In 2013, it actually moved dishwasher manufacturing jobs back to the United States from Mexico. The next year, it announced a $40 million investment in its Greenville, Ohio KitchenAid plant,...
President Donald Trump had Harley-Davidson executives and employees over to lunch at the White House last week and reiterated his promise to end wrong-headed trade policies that enable foreign countries to eat American workers’ lunch. The president reassured the Harley workers from the United Steelworkers (USW)...
During this very month last year, aluminum smelters across the United States were closing, one after another. It was as if they produced something useless, not a commodity crucial to everything from beverage cans to fighter jets. In January of 2016, Alcoa closed its Wenatchee Works...
Virtually every time President-elect Donald Trump performs in cities across America on his thank you tour, he mentions, to grand applause, his preference for Made in America. He describes his plan to create jobs with a federal infrastructure spending project – that is improvements to the...
All Chuck Jones was trying to say is that presidential-elect exaggeration is a killer when it involves jobs. It’s one thing for a candidate to inflate stuff like personal wealth. But when a president-elect tells the country he’s saved 1,100 jobs at a Midwestern manufacturing...
The defeat of the TPP is a tale of ants slaying a dragon. It seemed a fearsome task, challenging the powerful behemoth that is Wall Street, Big Pharma, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Big Ag, Big Oil, all their lobbyists, and all the Congress critters they’d...
The year 2001, when I became president of the United Steelworkers union and Hillary Clinton took office as a U.S. Senator for New York, was a desperate, terrible time for steelworkers and the steel industry in this country. I turned to her, among many others, for...