CLEVELAND - The vegetable
farms and greenhouses are fast disappearing from the
Flatlands, eaten away by sprawling suburbia. All over
northern Ohio we see spectacular industrial fossils -
Rust Belt remnants of the massive industrialization from
the 1880s to the 1950s, the time when the Great Lakes
were "the anvil of America" - producing most of the
world's iron, steel and petroleum products.
That
American Dream is no more - replaced by a catalogue of
ghost cities. Cleveland itself spent most of the recent
decades reeling from Rust Belt decay until finally
rebounding. The old heavyweight industrial Flats
district, along the Cuyahoga River waterfront, is a
fascinating test case of post-industrial redevelopment:
bars and restaurants filling gigantic old mills,
factories and warehouses, linked by a network of every
imaginable type of bridge.
Blue-collar anger is
also at its most visible in Cleveland. Take the former
workers of Republic Steel, the third-largest group in
the United States, named LTV until it went bankrupt in
December 2001. After that, workers' pension rights were
reduced by 65 percent. Most of the 56,000 wage earners
were left with US$700 a month and lost all medical
insurance. Mike is one of them. He describes their
situation in a nutshell: "Some of us get odd jobs and
wait to be 65 to get Medicare. And of course we pray to
the Lord not to get sick."
Since 1998, 35 other
US steel giants also have vanished. At least 250,000
workers have been left in the same alarming situation.
Thousands have lost their homes, and have to choose
between buying food or medicine for their families. When
their health holds, some can be found at a local
Wal-Mart, or McDonald's, slaving away for $7 an hour.
Whose fault is it? Joe has the recipe:
management greed, foreign dumping and globalization. Joe
blames those "Third World countries which come here to
sell their steel for nothing. In Washington, nobody
cares about steel. But we don't deserve this. We have
worked all our lives. We've paid our taxes. We've fought
in Vietnam."
That's more or less the standard
line at the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) union,
presided over by Canadian Leo Gerard, with an office
very close to the massive, rusting industrial no-man's
land sprawling around the Cuyahoga River. Gerard says,
"Our industry was destroyed by unfair competition from
China, Russia, Brazil, South Korea. They sell their
steel at whatever price to keep their production
capacity." That's now exactly the case: They sell for
less because national salaries are much lower and they
can still turn a mighty profit.
In March 2002,
the administration of President George W Bush decided to
impose taxes on steel imports as a way to protect US
steel. But the taxes were abolished last December after
enormous pressure inside the World Trade Organization
(WTO) from Japan, South Korea, China, Brazil, Russia and
the European Union.
Nowadays US steel is
concentrated in two giants: ISG and US Steel. They buy
bankrupt but productive factories, but they never absorb
their social responsibilities. In the past two years,
ISG has bought LTV, Bethlehem Steel and Acme Steel,
while US Steel bought Nucor and National Steel for next
to nothing. But the future of their workers remains a
blur. The factories need investment and modern equipment
to face the competition, and the salaries - compared
with those in Asia or South America - are huge. Nobody
seems interested in investing in a sector that is not
hugely profitable, is extremely competitive and seems to
be condemned to extinction by many US economists.
American steel is simply not competitive
anymore. Gerard says the USWA has 1.2 million members in
the United States and Canada. Seventy-five percent are
pensioners. Of this total, 250,000 have lost literally
everything. As for those still active, they are usually
older than 50, and steelworkers' health problems are
known to be legendary.
All work and no
play The steelworkers' plight is to be examined
under a broader perspective: the overall decline of the
average American's purchasing power. To keep the
standard of living they enjoyed 30 years ago, Americans
now have to work seven extra weeks a year. People in
Japan, France or Scandinavia work much less, while
Americans - especially married and with kids less than
18 years old - have to work much more: at least 51 hours
a week. Virtually half of the wage-earning population
needs to do that to make ends meet at the end of the
month.
The Bush administration has presided over
large job losses - Americans' No 1 concern. It may argue
now that unemployment has been falling for the past few
months. But it is the bigger picture that carries the
really alarming figures. Wage earners who have worked
for the same company for at least 10 years were 41
percent of the total US workforce 25 years ago. Now they
are only 30 percent. Two wage earners in five believe
they would never get the same job with the same salary
and benefits if they got laid off: certainly not the
steelworkers. With mergers and acquisitions and
industrial restructuring "creating value" for
stockholders, this number tends to skyrocket.
Enter populism Because for the past 30
years the United States has been turning to the right,
wealth today is even more concentrated than in the
1920s. The corporation rules, and wage earners have
fewer rights. The most extraordinary thing is that this
conservative wave is sold to the average American as a
war against the progressive "elites": a virtuous war of
the little guy against a despicable ruling class.
The Bush White House machine is masterful at
playing the populist card. That's how Bush gets a
substantial share of the white-wage-earner vote: The
Republican Party incarnates the little guy against a
ruling class (stuffed with Democrats) that despises his
"values". This reactionary, populist propaganda is
ubiquitous in radio talk shows and on Fox News. Instead
of attacking the really wealthy and powerful - after
all, many or most are Republicans - the attacks are
against symbols of consumer culture: smart cafes, good
restaurants, the great universities, vacations in
Europe, European cars. This kind of populism allegedly
reflects the preferences of deep America - where the
Republicans won handsomely in 2000.
So what is a
real American according to this caricature? For the Bush
White House machine, he eats huge Texas steaks, loves
the rural world (the whole Bush-in-Crawford scenario),
drinks local beer (Coors, Budweiser), works with his
hands and buys US cars (never a BMW or a Jaguar).
The unemployed, unhealthy, worried, angry
steelworkers in Ohio don't buy that myth. But at the
same time they balk at the prospect of independent
candidate Ralph Nader actually teaching Democrat John
Kerry a few lessons on how best to defend their rights.
For example, Kerry may adopt a Nader proposal for the
adoption of a minimum wage indexed by inflation. At
least 10 million US households make less than $10,000 a
year - which in India, it's true, is no less than a
maharajah-like income. And Kerry could slash all those
Bush tax cuts for the wealthy: it would be roughly what
the American Society of Civil Engineers said is
necessary to repair the country's crumbling
infrastructure of roads, bridges, schools, libraries,
public buildings and water and sewer systems.
The sad lot of the steelworkers in Cleveland is
just around the corner from the school-bus hordes
visiting the fake-pyramid I M Pei-designed Rock 'n' Roll
Hall of Fame and Museum - an apotheosis of
Disneylandization. A verse from rock 'n' roll heavy
worker Neil Young comes to mind as applied to the
steelworkers: "It's better to burn out than to fade
away."
Ohio is a key swing state. Bush and his
campaign team are constantly visiting. No one gets - or
stays - in the White House without carrying Ohio. But
the White House better beware: For Ohio blue collars,
Bush and globalization are the real evildoers. Says a
former steelworker at a Wal-Mart: "We're going to do
everything in our power so George W Bush this year will
join the unemployment line."
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Nerves of
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