United States pursues obscure trade cases
Fights may leave consumers, competitors paying more
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s high-profile trade offensives have grabbed headlines and rattled financial markets around the world. He’s battling China over the industries of the future, strong-arming Canada and Mexico into reshaping North American trade and threatening to tax cars from Europe. But his trade warriors are fighting dozens of more obscure battles – over laminated woven sacks from Vietnam, dried tart cherries from Turkey, rubber bands from Thailand and many others.
Under the radar, the Trump administration has launched 162 investigations into allegations that U.S. trading partners dump products at cut-rate prices or unfairly subsidize their exporters – a 224% jump from the number of cases the Obama administration pursued in the same time in office.
If the U.S. Commerce Department finds that U.S. companies have been hurt – and ultimately if the independent International Trade Commission goes along – the offending imports are slapped with duties that can price them out of the market.
On Thursday, for instance, the department announced levies of up to 337% in a battle over kitchen and bathroom countertops – or at least over the imported quartz slabs from China that many of them derive from.
These cases have nothing directly to do with the mother of all Trump’s trade wars: a cage match with China over Beijing’s aggressive push to transform Chinese companies into world leaders in cuttingedge industries like artificial intelligence and electric cars.
In that one, the world’s two biggest economies have slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of each other’s products.
The smaller antidumping and “countervailing duty” (aimed at unfair subsidies) cases are usually brought by U.S. companies or industries that say they’re being victimized by foreign competitors. But for the first time in more than 25 years, the administration in 2017 brought a case on its own – against a common alloy aluminum sheet from China – without waiting for an industry’s plea for help.
“They’re much more aggressive in every way,” said Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says the administration’s trade policies have “irrevocably changed the conversation on trade” and that the dumping and subsidy cases “help level the playing field for U.S. companies and workers.”
As with any conflict, though, the battles over remote patches of the commercial marketplace leave winners and losers.
Lovely says the Trump administration’s intervention in trade cases risks “tilting the playing field toward particular industries,” driving up prices and making the economy less efficient by driving away competition.
Whatever the impact, the administration’s America First approach to trade is encouraging more com
“They are using the U.S. government to try to wipe out their competitors.” Paul Nathanson American Quartz Worker Coalition spokesman
things better than they’ve been done in the past.”
Schlifske, 60, deflects personal praise to say kudos that go to him really should go to Northwestern Mutual.
“I’ve always felt that Northwestern Mutual has gotten its due for being a great corporate citizen, but now we're kind of getting recognized for some more transformational stuff, and that’s pretty neat,” he said.
Part of Schlifske’s motivation is that he loves Milwaukee. Schlifske, who has six children ages 13 to 30, grew up in Shorewood. Although he’s lived in world class cities like New York and Chicago, Milwaukee is home. He said he takes pride in Milwaukee as other people discover its benefits — cold weather notwithstanding — as well.
“To see now people moving here who have never lived here and saying things like, ‘I can’t believe what a great city this is,’ I just think that’s awesome,” Schlifske said.
And the goal is to make it better, he said.
Collaborating on a skyscraper
Plans for a towering new headquarters meant sitting down with City of Milwaukee officials to talk about the project — talks that brought together Schlifske, who early this decade joined former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes on a non-political campaign tour to business groups, and Barrett, a Democrat through-andthrough.
The two didn’t let any differences they may have about politics get in the way of a project that would be good for the city.
“I asked if Tom would meet with me because I wanted to build downtown. That was my personal goal. But I am not the king of Northwestern Mutual. I am a fiduciary. I report to a board. We have to do what’s in the best interest of the policy-owners,” Schlifske said. “I said the only way this is going to work is if the city can partner with us. And he did.”
While the company got tax incentives it wanted, the city received assurances that a portion of the workforce would be people from Milwaukee, creating an environment for well-paying jobs then and in the future. About 800 city residents were hired during construction, and the project awarded about $127 million in contracts to local small businesses.
“I think I’m just pragmatic. Let’s just get win-wins,” Schlifske said. “Most of the things I have to deal with aren’t political issues about right or left. It’s about how to get stuff done, and that’s what this project was.”
Schlifske continued: “I think the mayor and I, regardless of all our political views — and I’m not in line with him on everything — we definitely agreed we’ve got to get this city in the right direction. So that made for a common cause, common purpose, pragmatism, all that stuff. ‘We what do you need? Here’s what I need. Let’s work it out.’”
Wisconsin Business Leader of the Year winners get to choose the keynote speaker for a fundraising dinner event honoring the executive. Schlifske asked Barrett to give the speech.
“The common denominator is we both have a passion for moving the city forward,” Barrett said. “And time and time again, we have been able to partner to do what’s in the best interest of our community, whether it’s the construction of their fabulous iconic new building, the second structure they built (high-rise apartment building 7Seventy7), the Milwaukee Succeeds program, the work the company is doing around the tech hub initiatives. We really both understand the importance of recreating the city.”
Barrett said he and Schlifske “never really talk politics.”
When the Democratic National Committee was looking for a city for its 2020 convention, Northwestern Mutual hosted the DNC panel. That visit to the new Northwestern Mutual headquarters, attended by more than 200 business and community leaders, showed the depth of support for Milwaukee’s bid.
“He has been very clear in his ardent support for this, that this is good for the city, that this is not a political event, this is a civic event. That’s the way he’s viewed it. That’s the way his entire team has viewed it,” Barrett said. “He’s a joy to work with.”
Frustrated by education performance
Schlifske is frustrated by the performance of the Milwaukee educational system. He said there needs to be a unified effort — the way competing insurance companies band together to fight for the industry — in education. He hopes the group Milwaukee Succeeds can help on that front.
“There is no community voice around what we need to be demanding from our educational system, and I’m talking about the city of Milwaukee,” Schlifske said. “You’ve got choice, charter, parochial, public. We’ve got good leadership across that spectrum but we need to get more community involvement at the top in demanding and driving policies that we think are going to create better educational outcomes. We should be embarrassed about where we are.”
He added: “We can’t pass the buck on this. We have to have leaders across the political spectrum and the business spectrum and the not-for-profit spectrum all deciding that were going to make a difference.”
Pushing for a tech hub
Schlifske said his other non-company passion besides education is the idea of the Milwaukee area becoming a techology hub.
The tech hub movement is an effort to coalesce business leaders around the idea of increasing the number of tech workers here and boosting innovation and Milwaukee’s technological future.
“We’re firmly convinced that Milwaukee needs to upgrade now the sense of the city as a tech hub. I think the sense of the city as a place to live is better — all that stuff ’s good. But what we need to build out is the tech hub side because that just creates more of a cycle. The startup community, entrepreneurship, the ability for people in the tech industry to collaborate on projects,” Schlifske said.
He said tech hub work is “all longterm stuff where it’s hard to say what the payoff is in 2019.”
“But I just have this sense it’s going to lead to even more of a demand for people to want to live and work in the city, which is awesome,” Schlifske said.
The tech hub initiative goes hand-inhand with Northwestern Mutual’s own ongoing transformation to a more digital company focused on overall financial security for clients instead of only life insurance. Schlifske said the company embarked wholeheartedly on the transformation three or four years ago.
The company bought the online financial planning tool LearnVest and used part of it —and the LearnVest staff — to put together Northwestern Mutual’s own planning tool that can be used by agents and policy owners to map out personal financial futures.
“What really makes me excited is the traction we’re getting with our clients around becoming financially secure,” he said. “We’re moving from a company that was product-focused to a company that’s focused on the outcomes. Nobody buys life insurance because you want to own life insurance. You buy it because of what it does for you and your family. Increasingly we’re seeing our clients understand — and we can only do this through a digital platform — that financial security is really what they get when they come to do business with us.”
Barrett characterized Schlifske as straightforward, knowledgeable and analytical.
“And I love all those qualities,” Barrett said.
“He is not an ideologue,” said Sheehy. “He wants progress and he wants to push the city to another level, and he’ll work across all sectors to get that done.”
The annual Harvard Business School Club of Wisconsin’s dinner event honoring the Wisconsin Business Leader of the Year raises money to support scholarships for leaders of Wisconsin nonprofit organizations to attend a course in strategic management at Harvard Business School.
This year’s program will be held Tuesday in the Northwestern Mutual Grand Hall, 805 E. Mason St. A welcome reception is scheduled for 6 p.m., followed by dinner and the award program at 7 p.m. The event is open to the public, and tickets can be purchased at hbs-wi.com.
Paul Gores can paul.gores@jrn.com.
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