“Today we have signed an agreement with China to eliminate export subsidies that the United States challenged because they are prohibited under WTO (World Trade Organization) rules.”
So said United States Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman in announcing last week’s deal with China to end what Froman described as a “massive and complex export subsidy program”…
HONG KONG — An American labor union is pushing the United States to impose broad, steep tariffs on aluminum imports using a little-used but wide-ranging trade law that has riled the country’s trading partners in the past.
The effort by the United Steelworkers union comes with trade increasingly an election-year issue in the United States and elsewhere. More than three-quarters of the United States aluminum smelting industry that existed five years ago will have been idled or shut down by this summer as imports have surged, according to the union’s legal petition…
Trade has become a target this presidential campaign season. Both Democrats and Republicans have been attacking trade agreements as “unfair” to American workers.That resonates in places like Massena, N.Y., where voters cast primary ballots this week.
For more than a century, the Alcoa company has been making aluminum in Massena, a small city on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. Workers at Alcoa plants there made good wages — $20 to $30 an hour. But two years ago, faced with falling prices, the company decided to shutter one of its plants, eliminating more than 300 jobs.
“This influx of metal into the market from China and other countries, it’s flooded the market and drove the price down,” said Bob Smith, president of the local steelworkers union. “It’s hard to compete against that. That’s why we feel it’s unfair.”…
China has agreed to scrap some export subsidies on a range of products from metals to agriculture and textiles, the United States said on Thursday, in a step by Beijing to reduce trade frictions with Washington.
China ended a program which provided export subsidies of some $1 billion over three years to Chinese companies in seven economic sectors, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said…
The U.S. International Trade Commission will investigate the role of China and other big metal producers around the world in driving overproduction, which has contributed to dramatic price declines for aluminum on global markets.
Weak prices and intense foreign competition have in turn led to a wave of smelter shutdowns and layoffs in the U.S. aluminum industry…
A federal agency will be looking into the whether market manipulation is taking place in the aluminum industry.
The U.S. International Trade Commission announced Wednesday, April 6, that it is launching an investigation to examine the U.S. aluminum industry and global aluminum trade. The study will include a public hearing as well as research into recent trade trends and the factors that increased supply and drove down prices in recent months.
The drop in aluminum prices is one factor that led Alcoa to announce the curtailment of the Intalco Works aluminum smelter near Ferndale. The curtailment is scheduled to take place at the end of June, laying off around 465 workers…
