Families across Maine recently came together to celebrate our nation’s birthday and honor everything that makes America great. But during this celebratory time I couldn’t help but think of the challenges that we face as a state and a nation. These days, it’s hard to drive through towns and not notice shuttered houses and businesses, casualties of layoffs and jobs moved overseas.
I work at the Verso Paper mill in Bucksport. This year over 200 of my brothers and sisters there were laid off. Some were able to come back after a few months. Others have lost their jobs for good.
We are not alone. Stories of paper mills and plants shutting down are becoming more and more common. Eastern Fine Paper closed for good in Brewer. The Millinocket mill has shut its doors. The Old Town mill and East Millinocket mill both had to shut down for months last year, throwing hundreds of Mainers out of work.
These layoffs are just a small part of the economic pain sweeping our country. We have lost more manufacturing jobs over the last decade than during the Great Depression. Over 50,000 manufacturing facilities have closed, costing us 6 million manufacturing jobs. It’s a troubling sign of our nation’s diminishing industrial and innovative strength.
Nowhere is that clearer than in Maine. Between 2000 and 2010, we saw 20,700 manufacturing jobs disappear — 9,545 of those jobs to China alone.
It does not have to be like this. But we cannot solve our economic problems without addressing our outsourcing crisis. Our mills are shedding jobs because of increased competition from abroad. Yet many laws actually help our foreign competitors instead of the workers in Verso Paper.
Did you know that outsourcers can claim a tax credit for their moving expenses? Or that corporations can defer paying any taxes at all when they move overseas? We are giving tax breaks for companies that offshore jobs while Mainers struggle to find work and businesses attempt to compete with cheap foreign manufacturers.
What does that mean for us as a nation? We have become a nation that ships our factories overseas, and then wonders why our people are unemployed.
We make agreements with foreign companies that harm our workers — and then do nothing to heal the damage.
If we want to get our economy back on track, we must stop rewarding the companies who outsource our jobs. And we have to ensure that our trade with other countries creates American jobs, instead of forcing companies to lay off their workers, like mine did.
This week I went to Bangor to speak with U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud about the need to address our broken economic policies. To drive home our point, we delivered a gift basket of goods that are still made in Maine, including Chinet plates made in Waterville by members of the United Steelworkers Local 449 and magazines made on paper manufactured in Bucksport, by my own USW Local 261 and by USW Local 1188.
We asked our delegation to support the Bring Jobs Home Act. This bill cuts the tax deduction for moving expenses while rewarding businesses that bring good jobs back to the United States with a tax credit. By supporting the Bring Jobs Home Act (S. 2884), and its companion bill in the House (H.R. 5542), our leaders can take a good first step toward stopping offshoring and making the economy work for working people.
Michaud has been a champion of fair trade and of keeping jobs in Maine. He leads the fair-trade caucus in Congress and has sponsored legislation to fix the North American Free Trade Agreement and other failed policies that have cost us jobs.
More and more we hear that our country is at a crossroads. Our choices amount to a single question: What is our vision? Do we want an economy that invests in working families, or one that multiplies profits for overseas CEOs?
If we really want to honor our country’s birthday, we must ask our elected officials to help rebuild America by supporting the Bring Jobs Home Act and other efforts to create jobs.
Nothing is more American than creating an economy that works for everyone.
Tammy Marston is the political coordinator for United Steelworkers for the state of Maine.
To support the Bring Jobs Home Law go to the link below:
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=401
All good ideas Tammy. Now just come up with a way to do these things without taking anything away from the top 1% and it might gain traction. If not, forget it. They are the ones who profit the most from off shoring jobs and they could not possibly care less about you and I. They are also the ones who control our politicians, so don’t look for anything different from Washington. The parking lot is full all the time at WalMart. Everyone in there doesn’t believe it will be their job next.
More divisive class walfare rhetoric is hardly persuasive.
Bombardier has just announced that they have a deal, in writing, for the building of a whole new ‘C’ 320/330 series of airliner’s, that ‘Bomby’ has already publicly said is beyond their current facilities ability to cope with. One would hope that the folk’s in the DECD who are involved with the BNAS option have read this and are in discussion with ‘Bomby’ to bring those ‘C’ Series contracts here to Maine, either for manufacturing or for sub-assembly work. This would be a terrible opportunity to let go to waste when it is so clearly a needed ‘done deal’ for both Bombardier, who stand to make a ton of money out of it as well as increase their manufacturing capacity, and for Maine, that has at the BNAS Complex a huge amount of aviation knowledge just waiting to be unleashed as well as a Community College program that is educating and re-training the local labor force in the newer mechanical and composite manufacturing techniques that have come out of the windmill blade’s processing. What DECD also needs to make Bombardier aware of is that there are other airport’s in Maine that can be used for ‘Bomby’ sub-assembly manufacturing and repair. Oxford, Houlton and Presque Isle are the ‘Big 3’ in that area.
If Paulie is so dammed concerned about getting Maine back to work, well, here’s where he can start. And if he can’t then it’s up to the DECD to do it, inspite of the Governor. And just in case anyone has forgotten, Kestrel has already shown us all just what’s needed to make something like this work. DECD needs to take out their After Action report and start using it, now, to get ready. This type opportunity may not come around again for a V-E-R-Y long time…………
People complain that the economy is not good an that nothing is being done about it . But yet those same people want to hurt out economy like do away with fire crackers, motorcycles. casinos, horse racing, atvs, snowmobiles, hunting, fishing, dams an that would also get rid of motor boats an sail boats . Now if all of those were gotten rid of what would be left in Maine ? im sure that people could add other things to the list of thing to get rid off .
Beware union members speaking of “fair” trade… that usually means tariffs, taxes and bans that drive up costs to consumers and limit choice. “Fair” is very much in the eye of the beholder.
So we should do nothing about our jobs going overseas?
I didn’t say that – I said beware the unions’ preferred solutions.
So what type of solutions would you prefer?
Lowering the working wage to be more in line with China, India and other 3rd world countries?
Lowering environmental regulations to be more in line with Mexico, China and other 3rd world countries?
Lessing worker protections like China, Vietnam and other 3rd world countries?
Why is it Republican’s want to mold the US int eh image of the 3rd world?
I’m a republican??
In some cases, yes – wages should be lowered to reflect the global rate. You can’t regulate or legislate away economic reality. If one’s skillset is easily replicated by foreign labor that happens to be cheaper, then yes, you need to lower your rate or lose the work. That’s just reality. But the key is in offering better value – higher skill sets – than competing labor. That’s something we can do without reaching for protectionist tools that only drive up costs and reduce choice.
Yes we should let those jobs go and accelerate. If a job can be done by an illiterate third worlder for a tenth of our costs, yes let the job go. We need to focus on the type of manufacturing that unfortunately Mainers do not have skill sets for. Let people in China manufacture cheap goods while we focus on engineering/avaition high end manufacturing.
Also the world’s highest corporate taxes are now in the US.
Look below and thank you !
Still going with the anti-union meme. Wow. I am constantly amazed that we are watching wage earners across the board suffering declining wages and increased poverty and still this meme continues on.
You are the most astonishingly perfect dupe if you are less than a billionaire and argue against unions. In just a few years time, they will be gone and we will have the same circumstances we had in the 1890s. Wage slaves with no hope of prosperity. You have allowed the financial elites to do the thinking for you and they are stealing your country and your children’s future. There is nothing accidental about the hard times we find ourselves in.
I am sure that within this decade, the middle class right wingers who argued against the very thing that made this country thrive will know they played a part in the destruction of their homeland. Plutonomy has arrived and we are a fascist empire. I do not say that with ease and I take no pleasure in it.
Free trade requires stricter enforcement of human rights standards. We got one but not the other. This has created global labor arbitrage where wealthy corporations shop the cheapest labor on the planet and set up shop there. They have never cared for a moment about the destruction they have created and they never will.
We have handed the keys to avaricious sociopaths. They control our media, our elections and by virtue of these, our minds and souls.
The people must organize and end this through massive disobedience. First civil and then, if thwarted, by whatever means necessary. There is not a safe economy left to0 flea to. We are living in the most economically destructive age in the worlds history. Play the blame game and aid the elite by attacking unions and you will be nothing more than an unpaid accomplice in their greed soaked endeavors. Your union bashing is one of the ways they knew they could count on the people themselves aiding and abetting their own assured destruction. It has worked. Now we must watch it all crumble.
With your apparent clairvoyance (ability to see the future in such detail) you should start investing and become one of the financial elite you complain about. The rest of your post belongs on an Occupy poster.
Clairvoyance, not really. Eyes wide open and cognizant of the depths of greed in our elite, yes.
In a couple of years, you will be among those who saw and ignored the many signals that this was coming to pass.
Occupiers saw the gravity of the coming collapse and they were thwarted by the same elite. Did you miss the response Occupy got from the big Wall Street firms? They demanded the police break the movement up, even though the activities used to be considered protected rights. There were memos released of Wall Street elites investing in marketing campaigns to weaken the populist movement. Somehow you missed all of this. Convenient I guess.
You watched the first movement come and go and never even bothered to avail yourself of the point of their protests.
In some ways a Romney presidency will precipitate the decline faster and that might mean that the revolts that come of the collapse will happen sooner.
You are one of the fools that accept their arguments and make their job of exploiting an entire nation easy. How anyone could think in 2012 that unions are evil and corporations are morally acceptable defines ignorance.
Yeah, blame it on Occupy. They were trying to save your butt. You are really foolish if you think there is any chance of being a part of the “in” group. You are about to get tossed to the curb along with the rest of us.
Clairvoyance? Huh! READ neighbor!
Thanks for the chuckle. See you under the overpass.
Not I, neighbor, but your children, quite possibly.
I have survival experience and wits that will always serve me well. Fit, bright and clear-headed I am always ready for the next challenge.