International unions do delicate dance in Trump era

Acolumn last week made the mistake of saying that Leo Gerard, the Canadian-born international president of the United Steelworkers union attended a ceremony in the Oval Office last March with Donald Trump, where the president signed off on steel and aluminum tariffs.

In fact, the pictures of Gerard shaking hands with Trump, and receiving the pen with which the president signed the authorization, were from a different ceremony — the launch of a national security investigation into steel dumping by “bad actor” countries that took place a year earlier.

The Post is happy to correct an error that to many people might seem inconsequential. But it is far from trivial to Gerard and his union colleagues. Trump’s subsequent decision to categorize Canada as a “bad actor,” alongside countries guilty of dumping steel like China and Russia, has caused the USW a certain amount of discomfort. The union is at pains to point out that when Gerard was in the Oval Office in 2017, there was no suggestion that Canada would be side-swiped as a threat to U.S. national security.

The USW, and other international unions like the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, are attempting a difficult balancing act.

On the one hand, Gerard is fully supportive of Trump’s use of tariffs against countries like China, which, as he said in an interview with MSNBC’S Chuck Todd, would help level the playing field. The USW backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, but Gerard said Trump’s actions would “make it very hard for our members to ignore what he just did” in the next presidential election.

On the other, the subsequent inclusion of Canada in the list of countries affected by Trump’s trade action has left many USW members in Canada on the wrong side of the tariff wall. As Gerard told Todd, Canada should be exempt because of the integration of the industry on both sides of the border.

The USW didn’t appreciate another statement made in the column last week, in which I suggested the American Primary Aluminum Association, which advocates keeping aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico, claimed to be a “program partner” of the USW. The statement was made because it did. But it doesn’t now. The USW could not afford to be associated with any organization in favour of penalizing its Canadian members without risking a mass exodus, so the APAA was urged to remove any suggestion of affiliation from its website.

This is the delicate dance that many international unions are obliged to perform in the age of Trump. Three of the USW’S 13 “districts” are in Canada; Canada is a “territory” for the IAMAW.

They deny they are in a conflict of interest, but a member paying 1.3 per cent of her earnings in dues might wonder why the union leadership is making positive noises about a president who appears intent on depriving her of a job.

For union leaders, being part of an international organization is a no-brainer. A number of them are in Singapore right now at a convention of international transport workers. Senior executives sit on international advisory boards that top up their salaries.

But for members on the front lines, the benefits are less apparent. When the U.S. Commerce Department imposed duties of nearly 300 per cent on Bombardier, at the behest of Boeing, the machinists union found itself with members on both sides of the dispute. The Canadian response was muted — a press release decrying its “one more in a series of bad decisions.” But while Canadian officials were complaining about Trump’s protectionism, the union’s international president, Robert Martinez Jr., was urging the president to “bring work home to the United States, instead of continuing to ship jobs overseas” when he visited Boeing in South Carolina. Again, the target was China but Trump’s blunderbuss trade actions do not discern between friend and foe.

Mark Rowlinson, assistant to USW national director Ken Neumann, said his union is working as hard as it can to get the U.S. Administration to remove tariffs imposed on Canada. “Having a strong voice in the U.S. and Canada is of assistance as we push back against the dangerous and harmful section 232 tariffs,” he said.

A cynic might suggest there are many steelworkers in the U.S. who are content with the status quo — after all, unused capacity is back in production, new jobs have been created and prices for hot rolled steel have risen nearly 50 per cent year on year. The entire USW leadership can’t stress enough how unanimously and publicly they oppose steel tariffs on Canada. But one suspects there are more than a few Canadian union members who are less than enthusiastic about living up to their initiation pledge — that “at every opportunity I shall say a good word about my union.”