[stop-imf] Steelworkers: IMF Hurts Workers, North and South

[Robert Weissman]

FOR RELEASE 8 a.m. March 3, 2003

Contact: Marco Trbovich (412) 562-2442

USWA President Assails IMF's Role in Damaging Developing Economies, Raising
Record Trade Deficit

Says Treasury's hand in IMF policies contributes to record

U.S. job losses; exploitation of workers in developing nations

Pittsburgh -- In a speech today to the Ninth World Steel Conference in
Prague, Czech Republic, United Steelworkers of America (USWA) international
president Leo W. Gerard assailed the U.S Treasury for supporting
International Monetary Fund (IMF) financing plans for developing countries
that exploit workers, drive up the U.S. trade deficit, and wipe out
millions of American manufacturing jobs.

"The IMF, in which the U.S. Treasury has a powerful capital position,"
Gerard told the gathering, "is imposing financing plans on developing
countries that strongly encourage worker exploitation.

"Unlike the path historically followed by industrialized countries, nations
with distressed economies are forced by the IMF to give priority to export
production instead of diversifying their domestic economies.

"In order to attract foreign investors, these countries are urged to weaken
their labor laws, suppress wages and eliminate collective bargaining in the
few places where meaningful labor laws actually exist."

Gerard asserted that the IMF's demand for austerity programs has undermined
developing countries' domestic economies, resulting in a flood of imports
in the United States, a prime cause of the loss of nearly two million
American manufacturing jobs in recent years and the record $435-billion
trade deficit in 2002.

"These are not random acts driven by market forces," he said. "They're
calculated efforts, based on financing plans that often instigate political
corruption and reap enormous returns for Western banking interests at
enormous cost to workers and their communities."

He cited IMF policies as the culprit in the Asian financial crisis, which
triggered subsequent financial crises in Russia and Latin America, and as
the principle cause of the crisis in the American steel industry that has
driven 37 companies into bankruptcy, cost 85,000 Steelworkers their jobs,
and wiped out the health care benefits of nearly 200,000 Steelworker retirees.

"The global trading system being enforced by the IMF," Gerard said, "is
making it nearly impossible to overcome the worldwide over capacity in
steel of some 300 million tons. And that beat keeps going at a record clip.
In January, worldwide crude production of steel topped 76-million tons the
highest every recorded in the first month of a year and nearly 11 percent
higher than January of last year."

"The explosive growth of globalization," he concluded, "launched without
considering the interests of workers or even producers has caused a
downward spiral in primary metals' pricing and company profitability that's
proving very hard to arrest.

"We take some solace in the fact that the tariffs the U.S. government
imposed last year have stabilized prices somewhat, but we can have no peace
of mind as long as our members and retirees continue to be the victims of
trading policies they had no voice in creating."

Citing the growing number of what Nobel Prize-winner and former World Bank
Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz has termed "IMF riots" by the citizens of
nations being forced to comply with IMF policies, Gerard cautioned that
"unless the IMF's policies change, the social unrest that's cropping up
more and more in developing countries will sooner or later come home to
roost in nations of the industrialized West."

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