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The new World Trade Center is being built. It will have a lot of glass. That glass will be made in China. The old World Trade Center, taken down on 9/11, had no imported glass.
Corning and Guardian Industries are two big U.S. glass makers.
So the U.S. glass industry must not be competitive. Cheap Chinese glass must be because of their low labor rates. Right? Hardly.
How much labor goes into making glass? Very little. The labor cost per unit of production is quite small.
They [United Steelworkers glass industry department] say that Chinese glassmakers are competitive in the American marketplace only because they have received giant subsidies in recent years from the Chinese government. The subsidies offset, among other things, the high cost of shipping heavy glass — auto windshields, for example — across the Pacific.
Imagine. The building that started the Iraq war. Rebuilt. A symbol of U.S. economic strength. Sheathed with imported glass.
And it does not have to be that way. If we had true free trade, without all the foreign currency, tax and other subsidies, then we would prosper.
But the U.S. has had no economic strategy. Promoting "free trade" agreements is not a strategy.
But a U.S. economic strategy would be decried as "socialism". Look at the Fenton Art Glass owner's quote:
“I need some relief from government to stay in business,” Mr. Fenton said..., “but I’m not sure it is the government’s role to keep me in business.”
True, but misleading. And a destructive line of thinking. It is the government's role to have a trade and economic strategy. Or to level the playing field in response to the actions of competing trading nations.
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