(The following story by H.J. Cummins appeared on the Star Tribune website on October 29.)
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — With the presidential candidates concentrating on Iraq, two of the nation’s biggest labor groups came to Minnesota to talk jobs, with a pro-Democratic bent, during appearances on Thursday.
Teamsters International President James Hoffa made four get-out-the-vote stops at union shops from Coon Rapids to Shakopee, telling workers, “This is the most important election you’ll ever see,” and asking them to defeat George W. Bush because he “has declared war on the middle class and working people in America.”
At the same time, the national AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Council released a report in St. Paul saying that the U.S. Labor Department’s method for certifying manufacturing jobs lost to overseas trade chronically understates them.
In its own look at four states — Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Washington state — the Washington, D.C.-based council concluded that 50 to 90 percent of the manufacturing jobs lost between January 2001 and August 2004 fell to the effects of overseas trade.
That’s much higher than the percentage certified in Minnesota — 11,671 of 45,400 over the same period — and the council is analyzing Minnesota numbers as it did the other four states, according to Bob Baugh, executive director of the council.
Hoffa is on a three-week trip through swing states, including Minnesota, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Teamsters have endorsed John Kerry, who has promised to fight off-shoring of jobs through tax-policy changes. The union also has criticized Bush for the new overtime regulations, his proposal to privatize Social Security savings, and for allowing 46 million Americans to go without health care coverage.
Mike Lund, an unemployed sheet metal worker in St. Paul, joined Hoffa for part of Thursday. Lund lost his job at Whirlpool when the company closed its St. Paul operation 20 years ago, sending most of its manufacturing to Mexico and South America, he said.
“That was the beginning of outsourcing,” Lund said.
Then last fall he lost his job at Timesavers Inc., a metro-area manufacturer of industrial sanders, which outsources some production to Taiwan and to other local shops.
Timesavers has cut its production employees from about 125 to 35, human resources director Richard Meier confirmed in an interview.
The company outsources some parts production, Meier said, because it must cut costs.
“What we’re struggling to do is continue to manufacture in Minnesota, and we retained as many jobs as we could,” he said.
Minnesota has added 1,000 manufacturing jobs since August, said Steve Hine, labor market research director at the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development. There’s no doubt the official count of manufacturing jobs lost overseas misses many, Hine said. For example, it doesn’t count jobs that were never here because they got created overseas. But any definitive count is elusive, he said.
Hoffa and Baugh said offshoring is jeopardizing America’s economic future.
“Manufacturing accounts for two-thirds of all R&D investments in the U.S.,” Baugh said. As it follows the work overseas, “we are losing the skills, the knowledge base, and the intellectual and technical capacity that should be the basis for the next innovation, the next product and the jobs of the future.”