Put American Jobs First

By Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa
Published By The Detroit News on September 8, 2010

The official unemployment rate in Detroit was 28.9 percent in July, the highest since Michigan started keeping modern numbers. This is a frightening sign of a city in deep trouble.

Thirty million Americans who want a full-time job can’t find one. This is a catastrophe of the magnitude of a war, a flood or a hurricane. Countless lives are being ruined, families shattered, communities impoverished.

I’m afraid this unemployment crisis will destroy the social fabric of our nation. Far too many people are finding out that working hard and following the rules isn’t enough anymore.

Waiting and hoping for things to get better won’t work. America lost jobs continually for two years, and it’s going to take longer than that to bring them back.  Some economists say it will be 10 years before the unemployment rate returns to what it was when the recession started in December 2007.

Unfortunately, waiting and hoping is pretty much what corporate America wants us to do. And corporate America is in the driver’s seat. Even though it’s obvious what needs to happen to put our economy back on track, corporate America isn’t interested.

We desperately need to start putting America first. Like it or not, the federal government accounts for about 20 percent of our economy. The federal government should be buying goods and services from companies headquartered in America that employ American workers. All of our trading partners do it.

For far too long the federal government has ignored the needs of the American worker. There never should have been a controversy over the U.S. Air Force awarding a contract to Airbus, the European aerospace company. The U.S. Navy shouldn’t be granting contracts to companies like Accenture, which moved its headquarters to Ireland to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Nor does the U.S. government have any business awarding billions of dollars in contracts to companies like Dell Computer. Dell, the federal government’s 11th biggest prime contractor, will shut its last major U.S. plant in North Carolina next year and transfer the work overseas.

But corporate America is fighting back hard against “Buy America” policies. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce actually claims “Buy America” will cost U.S. jobs.

Here’s a news flash: The chamber of commerce doesn’t give a damn about American jobs. The main culprits who cut 8 million jobs in 2008-09 were the private businesses represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

We don’t have strong “Buy America” policies because too many powerful multinationals are earning record profits by sending jobs overseas. I frankly don’t understand why the Chamber of Commerce even has “U.S.” in its name. There are a half-dozen directors at the chamber who actually represent foreign companies.

To create American jobs, there are things we can do in addition to buying American. We need to fix our trade policy, especially with China. We need to rebuild our infrastructure. We need to subsidize growth industries that create good-quality jobs, as we did when we rescued GM and Chrysler.

But none of that will happen as long as U.S. companies that send jobs overseas are calling the shots. And believe me, they will go all out this November to fill Congress with politicians who care more about their profits than about the well-being of the American worker.

It’s up to our brothers and sisters in the labor movement to prevent that from happening. We must do everything we can in order to make sure that we elect candidates who truly care about bringing jobs back to America.

To read archived articles from General President Hoffa, click here.