Union President, Former AFL-CIO Policy Director Mull Biden USTR Choice

United Steelworkers recommended a candidate to the Joe Biden transition team for the next U.S. trade representative, and emphasized how important that USTR pick is to the union, President Tom Conway told a virtual audience for a webinar hosted by the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “We expect to see a bunch of friends we can work with,” Conway said Dec. 3. AAM is partly funded by the Steelworkers, and an AAM employee is volunteering on the USTR transition team.

Thea Lee, Economic Policy Institute president and the former top-ranking AFL-CIO official, was more cautious. She said unions don't want to see a knee-jerk free trader, as “we've seen in the past. Outside pressure will be helpful” to choose someone more skeptical on free trade's benefits for American workers, she said. Lee said she has been happy with the economic team Biden has announced so far. The incoming administration has the right idea about connecting infrastructure spending and climate change “with a good trade policy,” she said. She said trade policy needs to serve strengthening domestic manufacturing. Lee also said the U.S. needs a border adjustment tariff to prevent importing dirty steel or other products from countries that are not doing the same work to reduce emissions.

Some trade observers have said that although the president-elect frequently talks about not wanting a trade war with Europe, it could be politically difficult to remove Section 232 tariffs (see 2011180035). Conway confirmed that. If you remove Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum “you're going right back to where you were” in terms of struggling mills and smelters, he said. He suggested that a Buy American policy for rebuilding our electric grid could be an adequate substitute for the aluminum tariffs. He earlier said that steel tariffs helped that industry for only three or four months, because buyers decided that paying the tariff was comparable to the higher domestic steel prices that followed the tariffs.