Bush’s Textile Policies Are Amiss, Frank Charges
WASHINGTON, Oct. 01, 2002–U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, a member of the Congressional Textile Caucus, has torn into the Bush administration’s plans for aiding in the recovery of the domestic textile industry.
In response to the Caucus’s request to President Bush for an urgent remedy for the critical industry, Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans released a report to Congress two weeks ago in which he gave an account of how the administration has worked to improve the condition of the industry so far.
But Frank, while welcoming the Bush administration’s attention to the issue, said in an e-mail statement that the administration’s efforts were “still grossly inadequate to the challenge.” In some sense, he said, the policies simply represent either the enforcement of existing law or efforts that will take time to implement and even more time to benefit Americans. “The administration continues to resist what I and many others believe is one of the most important things we can do – adopt a policy that says that people wishing to export goods to the U.S. should follow appropriate labor and environmental standards.”
For almost 22 years, Frank has been representing the 4th District of Massachusetts, which includes Fall River and New Bedford, where the textile and apparel industries have historically flourished. Though the industries are not as thriving as they used to be, they provided jobs to 23,196 people in Massachusetts in 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That put the state 13th in the nation in textile industry employment.
“The current economic plight of the American textile industry is the worst since the Great Depression,” said Charles Bremer, vice president of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute’s international trade division. “Textile firms that survived the Great Depression, some of them over 100 years old, have ceased to exist in the last three years.”
Last year, 116 textile mills closed and about 67,000 workers were laid off nationwide, a 13 percent loss for the textile industry. The industry’s crisis began in 1997, when the U.S. dollar’s value rose against the major Asian currencies. Since then, 177,000 domestic textile jobs have been lost and cheaper Asian merchandise has spread in the U.S. market, according to the institute.
Frank, along with 30 other congressmen who are mostly from southern states with a long history in the textile industry, petitioned President Bush last August, requesting the administration’s assistance in coping with the crisis. Six months later, Evans formed a Textile Working Group to ensure that the administration would address the concerns.
That interagency group’s report, released two weeks ago, mainly emphasized tightening international trade regulations to the benefit of the U.S. industry by pressing its demands before the World Trade Organization. The WTO administers the rules of international trade among its 144 member nations.
In addition, the administration has already denied requests for additional import levels sought by countries it considered to be harboring terrorists, such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.
But Frank said those steps do not seem effective. Given the disparity between the economies of the United States and many poor nations, he said, it is cheaper for those nations than it is for America to make a variety of goods and that we should not propose a total ban on imports of their products.
On the other hand, he said, it is also true that some countries can produce more cheaply “because they exploit child labor, pay people a few cents an hour for 60, 70 and 80-hour weeks, pay no attention to occupational safety, refuse to allow workers to organize to bargain collectively for their own protection and pay no attention to environmental standards. Competitive advantage that comes from different economic circumstances in general is a reasonable factor. Additional competitive advantage that comes from exploitation of workers and the environment is not legitimate.”
Poor countries are not always to blame, Bremer said. Many top American brand apparel products are made abroad and imported back to the domestic market. “Companies should be free to make goods wherever they want,” he said. “What they should not be free to do is exploit and abuse workers, use child labor, slave labor, etc. But they do.”
Though a head wind keeps blowing hard on the U.S. textile and apparel industries, there has been and will be hope to survive, said Larry Liebenow, president and CEO of Quaker Fabric Corp, the largest single employer in Fall River. The company has been hiring more and more employees during the “textile depression”-about 3,000 people are working at Quaker, compared to 1,000 in 1990.
“The key to success is to become a global company that knows how to design and sell the products to the global markets,” said Liebenow, whose company has shifted to specializing in original design, technology, quality and delivery that are too unique and exceptional for the low-cost countries to emulate or compete.
At the same time, Cliftex Corp., once the leading manufacturer of men’s custom-made clothing in New Bedford, went out of business last summer for the most part because the company lost to not only foreign but also domestic rivals amid the low price competition, said Harvey Mickelson, a company’s lawyer for 35 years.
Concerned about his district’s economy, Frank said it is impractical to allow virtually unlimited imports. “I do note the hypocrisy of many who claim to be for free trade when it affects textiles but in fact follow very anti-free trade policies with regard to agriculture, where America heavily subsidizes our own production and in fact undercuts the economies of these poor nations.”
Published in The New Bedford Standard Times, in Massachusetts.
