South Carolina Ping
Posted on 04/04/2005 4:34:21 PM PDT by Coleus
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON - Shirts, pants, underwear and a lot of other clothes made abroad have arrived in the United States by the bulging boatload since Jan. 1, when more than three decades of quotas ended.
Consumers are rejoicing over the lower prices. But the domestic textile and apparel industry is complaining about the loss of thousands of jobs from what it contends is unfair competition. It wants the Bush administration to move quickly to limit the soaring number of shipments from China.
"Time is so critical. The amount of goods that China is flooding into this market is so large that only the government can move quickly enough to prevent a lot of textile jobs from being lost," said Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations.
According to data released Friday by the Commerce Department, China shipped 84.48 million cotton knit shirts to the United States in the first three months of this year, an increase of 1,258 percent from the same period a year ago. Shipments of 78.99 million cotton trousers represented an increase of 1,521 percent
Just three months after the quotas expired, U.S. manufacturers say the fallout has been swift and severe. Another government report Friday showed the loss of 7,600 textile and apparel jobs, bringing job losses for the industry to 17,200 this year.
In the past three months, 14 textile plants in five states — North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Virginia — have shut down. More could come, industry officials say, without federal action.
"The textile and apparel industry will experience severe job losses in 2005 unless the U.S. government decisively confronts China's predatory trade practices," said Auggie Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, an industry group.
For more than three decades, quotas restricted imports of clothes, yarns, cloth and other textiles to the United States and other wealthy nations. Those barriers disappeared as part of an agreement in the last round of global trade talks.
The quotas have been phased out over 10 years. But the United States and other nations kept controls on the biggest categories of clothing as long as was permitted, sheltering their domestic industries.
As expected, China has been the biggest beneficiary of the total elimination of quotas, reflecting the country's highly efficient manufacturing plants.
Under the terms for China's admission to the World Trade Organization, the United States and other countries have the power to restore the quotas — called government safeguards — should the surge in Chinese shipments prove to be disruptive to the domestic industry.
The quotas would cap growth in categories such as trousers and knit shirts to just 7.5 percent more than shipments of those goods during the previous 12 months.
The industry applied for this protection in 20 different clothing categories last fall.
Retailers, who benefit from lower-cost products, persuaded a court to block the government from considering the request, arguing there was no basis for quotas just because of the threat of higher imports.
Textile industry officials are preparing new requests for help. They also are lobbying the administration to initiate cases rather than awaiting industry requests.
The government's filing of its own cases could cut the time it takes to make a decision from four months to perhaps five weeks, according to the industry.
The industry hopes textile-state lawmakers will hinge their support of a free trade agreement with six Latin American countries — a White House priority — on an administration agreement to bring cases against China.
The administration has not said publicly what it will do. "We will be driven by the facts in the case," Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told reporters last week.
Some trade experts would not be surprised if the two issues become entwined. The White House needs votes to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement. In 2003, it courted textile-state lawmakers when the administration faced a close House vote that went Bush's way, giving the president the power he needed to negotiate new trade deals.
"There is a precedent to believing that the administration can be held hostage," said Dan Ikenson, a trade policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. The group opposes putting quotas back in place on Chinese textile products, saying that would hurt U.S. consumers.
"This is an extension of business as usual for the U.S. textile industry, which has become addicted to government assistance," Ikenson said. On the Net:
Commerce Department's textile office: http://otexa.ita.doc.gov
National Council of Textile Organizations: http://www.ncto.org
United States Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel: http://www.usaita.com
The Chinese Panty Invasion.
yikes!
If you protect low pay jobs like those in the textile industry, then that is the kind of job your people will have.
I say let the Chinese have them.
If you protect low pay jobs like those in the textile industry, then that is the kind of job your people will have.
When it's either that or welfare, I say we'd better keep the jobs...But hey, look around...Thousands of high pay jobs have left also...
Unemployment's going down. International trade generates better jobs than it eliminates in the long run.
Get ready to be flamed!!! The people against economic freedom (free trade) are going to fire up the flame throwers.
Mechanical, chemical and manufacturing engineers.
Accountants, IT workers, seasoned managers,...all of the front/back office types, all of the support staff. All of their vendors.
These are not bloated, union shops we are talking about. These plants were the best and leanest of all to have lasted this long.
Sonoco is one of the largest employer in Darlington County, SC. They manufacture packaging materials. They recently moved some of their operations to China because that is where their customers (textile companies) had moved to.
Yet Japan, with no natural resources, seems to still be doing okay in the textiles business (it's been several months since I looked at textiles in Japan, but it was holding steady.) And Japan also builds a lot of the world's textile processing equipment, as does Italy and Germany. (That's based on old data, and could have changed by now -- but if the trends back in the 1990s hold up, it would just mean that Japan has even more of that business.)
All?
Can we be honest about trade in this forum for once?
http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/FTBs/FTB-014.pdf [3 page pdf easy read]
Yes, but what you're ignoring is that imports create jobs as well--good jobs. If imports were a constant drain on good jobs, we'd be in the stone age because our country has been deluged with imports since WWII. Yet that is the period of time during which our economic well-being has increased the most.
I find it hard to believe that cheaper labor costs isn't the determining factor in that equation.
When I first moved to NC, I had to take a job at a textile mill until I could find a job in my chosen profession. I was surprised to find myself making $13.50 an hour starting pay at a bottom level job. Today that same job pays about $6.00 per hour if you can find it. Overseas competition not only takes away jobs, it lowers salaries also.
Japans success if because they are highly automated. Automation and superior products that cannot be produced elsewhere has been the key success of the surviving textile mills here in the US also.
Talk about losing our panties here in the US, er what? :)
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