Steelworkers FTW WTF

I was in the middle of a busy period of life when a month ago, the Steelworkers submitted a 5,800-page petition urging the Obama administration to file a WTO case again Chinese subsidies for green technologies. I just found out about it today. I got really pissed off.

The way USW is going about this is completely backwards. They’re accusing China of engaging in “illegal practices that stimulate and protect its domestic producers of green technology, ranging from wind and solar energy products to advanced batteries and energy-efficient vehicles.” This is a double whammy. Not only does it reinforce the frame that domestic industrial policy is bad and legitimizes the use of the WTO to attack such policy (and why the hell would USW want to advance that frame?!), it also is a slap in the face for climate activists who would probably like nothing more than to see China, the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter, invest in developing cleaner technologies.

To add insult to injury, this is all also completely hypocritical, since USW, as a founding member of the Blue-Green Alliance, would love to see massive U.S. investment in the domestic green economy. It’s a classic case of kicking away the ladder: denying developing countries the policy tools we want to be able to use ourselves.

What’s interesting is the Blue-Green Alliance statement on the USW petition. It’s decidedly lukewarm and avoids condemning China as an enemy engaging in “unfair practices.” I wonder what the politics behind the scenes here must have been like. In any case, I suspect this is a more useful position for progressives to adopt:

Today’s Section 301 petition filed by the United Steelworkers underscores the importance that the United States act quickly to take advantage of the job-creating opportunities of the clean energy economy. Every day America delays action is another day that China capitalizes on jobs created in the production of clean energy technologies that could and should be developed, manufactured, and installed in the United States.

This looks pretty different from USW’s condemnation of China using legitimate policy tools to promote their industries. There’s still the requisite vaguely nativist language, but instead of blaming China for doing what we should be doing, it puts the onus on U.S. policymakers to create our own industrial policy for the green economy – WTO legality be damned. This is a useful frame that USW has undermined: instead of thinking about what is and isn’t legal under the messed up WTO rules, we should be thinking about what policy goals we want to work towards, and if the WTO rules need to be changed to allow them, we should campaign for WTO reform.

(As an aside, interestingly, this week the Brookings/AEI green economy proposal came out, and even if it’s not something progressives can get behind, as Dani Rodrik pointed out, if this isn’t an industrial policy proposal, nothing is. And this coming from AEI!)

USW’s is exactly the kind of stance organized labor needs to not be taking in a modern world characterized by increasing interconnectedness and potentially imminent environmental catastrophe. We need a less provincial labor movement and more of a global working class consciousness in order to get anything done. Somewhere, Frances Fox Piven is saying, “I told you so.”