[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 75 (Saturday, May 26, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5798-S5800]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. DURBIN (for himself, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Byrd, Mr. 
        Hollings, Mr. Specter, and Ms. Mikulski):
  S. 979. A bill to amend United States trade laws to address more 
effectively import crises, and for other purposes; to the Committee on 
Finance.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce bipartisan 
legislation known as the Fair Trade Law Reform Act of 2001 with my 
colleagues Senators Rockefeller, Byrd, Hollings, Specter, and Mikulski. 
This legislation will change for the better the way we trade with our 
global trading partners.
  We talked a lot about trade in the last Congress. We voted to extend 
Permanent Normal Trade Relations status to China. We debated and passed 
the Africa Growth and Opportunities Act. Now, we have a new 
administration asking for Trade Promotion Authority and bilateral trade 
agreements with Jordan and Vietnam.
  Today, we have just passed the President's tax bill. As far as I am 
concerned, the Congress and more specifically the Senate Committee on 
Finance should now turn its attention to the important matter of trade 
between our country and our global trading partners around the world. 
We need to have a discussion about what we are doing to make sure our 
manufacturers, our steel makers, our textile workers and our farmers 
are able to compete on a level playing field.
  One industry, in particular, has been facing a deluge of imports from 
some 30 nations. The U.S. steel industry has for the last 4 years been 
battered by imports from foreign countries. We know from prior unfair 
trade cases that much of it is being dumped on our shores, and 
subsidized by foreign governments, at prices that are at historic lows. 
And we are talking about blatant subsidization. Look at the Korean 
government's relation to Hanbo and Posco. To this date, they have not 
fully divested their government role in those two steelmaking entities.
  Many of the same nations who have been exporting steel to the U.S., 
have erected import restraints in their own countries or have filed 
dumping cases to keep this deluge from their own shores. The U.S. has 
become the export market of first and last resort for the whole world.
  Some of these same nations throughout Europe and Asia, who erected 
trade barriers to this onslaught because of the harm it threatened over 
there, are arguing that our industry is not similarly threatened, or 
that our law doesn't permit us to take remedial action, even 
temporarily. Some argue that the industry has not been sufficiently 
harmed by this situation. Not

[[Page S5799]]

enough firms have gone under, not enough workers have been laid off. In 
other words, in order to prove sufficient harm to save your job, you 
must first lose it.
  One week ago today, Northwestern Wire and Rod in Sterling, IL, shut 
down its furnace. It will roll out the rest of its billets and then 
close its doors. That's almost 1,500 employees. Over one-third of the 
residents of Sterling get their health insurance through Northwestern 
steel. Acme Steel has had financial difficulties. Five Illinois steel 
companies have either shut their doors or declared bankruptcy since 
1998 and I don't see an end in sight.
  My constituents are told that this is just the ``free market'' at 
work. That this is just the world markets working out the kinks. I find 
all this incredible. Some of these other nations must be laughing up 
their sleeves at our apparent helplessness and we are the only ones who 
don't get the joke.
  Let me state for the record: I believe that free trade is very 
important for the United States. I also believe that fair trade is just 
as important. We are not helpless. We do not expect our businesses to 
all go under, our workers to all be laid off, before we wake up and 
take action.
  We must take action in the 107th Congress to address basic 
inadequacies of our trade laws. We have made it easier to send our 
products and services to other countries. Yet, we haven't seemed to be 
able to address successfully the steel crisis that's been with us now 
for nearly 4 years.
  Our trade laws, particularly the antidumping and countervailing duty 
laws, have long been, and remain, critically important to the U.S. 
manufacturing sector. They are the last line of defense for U.S. 
industries, operating on market-economy principles, against injury 
caused by unfairly traded imports. The heart of U.S. trade policy 
maintains that while America keeps an open market to fairly traded 
goods of any origin, our industries and workers will not be subject to 
injury from unfairly traded imports because the trade laws will be 
enforced and kept up-to-date.
  The last general reform of the U.S. trade laws, unconnected to any 
particular trade agreement, occurred more than a decade ago. In that 
time, the problems to which these laws must respond have changed 
considerably, as underscored by the late 1990s Asian and Russian 
economic conflagrations and the ripple effect of results felt 
worldwide. It has become painfully clear that current trade laws are 
either incapable of responding to the kinds of sudden import surges--
causing dramatic and rapid injury--or we have had various 
administrations that were unable to enforce them.
  Our trade laws themselves are fully consistent with WTO rules. But 
they need to be revisited and made stronger. This bipartisan 
legislation would do several things:
  First, we should strengthen section 201 language by removing a very 
high causation standard and replacing that standard with a lower 
threshold by which U.S. industries and workers can prove their cases 
more easily. Let me state for the record that if we reform our trade 
laws and we ensure our trading partners know we are serious about 
enforcing those laws, the incentive to dump steel or other imported 
products will be reduced.
  Second, the AD/CVD sections of this bill respond to the fact that 
current U.S. law makes relief unnecessarily difficult to obtain, 
imposing standards more onerous than those in the relevant WTO 
agreements. By updating the antidumping and countervailing duty laws, 
in light of new global economic realities to which those laws must now 
respond, we will reverse errant court decisions that had limited the 
laws' remedial reach in a manner never contemplated by the Congress.
  And finally, we will establish a steel import monitoring provision, 
comparable to WTO-compatible programs maintained by other WTO members 
such as the EU, Canada, and Mexico.
  The Congress, I might add, has not been silent during this debate 
over the last several years. We have had extensive debate in both the 
House and Senate and we passed the Byrd-Durbin Steel Loan Guarantee 
Program last year. This legislation was intended to provide immediate 
relief to qualified steel firms that have fallen on hard times. 
Unfortunately, the loan guarantee wasn't as successful as we had hoped. 
Despite a guarantee of 85 percent by the Federal Government, private 
creditors didn't step up to the plate and do their part to help our 
Nation's steel industry.
  So, despite our still growing economy, despite our efforts to date, 
despite fiscal dilemmas in other parts of the world, we can't forget 
the steel industry. With over 10,000 steelworkers out of jobs and 
imports still fluctuating, I want to go home and tell my constituents 
in the steel pipe and tube industry that we have a solution to their 
woes. Let's send a clear signal to our trading partners, to our 
farmers, and to our manufacturers that we don't intend to stand by and 
lose more and more jobs because of unfair trading practices.
  I thank my colleagues for helping me draft this legislation and I 
look forward to working with my colleagues on the Finance Committee to 
having hearings, to marking up this important piece of legislation, and 
enacting it into law.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues, 
Senators Durbin, Hollings, and Byrd, in introducing the Trade Law 
Reform Act of 2001. It has been far too long, well over a decade in 
fact, since the last general reform of our trade laws, and current 
circumstances, particularly the ongoing steel crisis that has resulted 
in 18 American steel companies declaring for bankruptcy since 1997, 
necessitate the prompt action of Congress.
  Nothing short of section 201 can save the American steel industry. I 
have written President Bush twice since he took office in January 
urgently pleading with him to initiate a section 201 case before the 
International Trade Commission. In the time between my first and second 
letters, five U.S. steelmakers filed for bankruptcy. Imports have 
continued at record levels and prices have not rebounded. Absent a 
Section 201, any measures we take up in the Congress to redress the 
steel crisis are akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
  Despite the necessity of an immediate section 201 on steel, we must 
not cease in our efforts to improve the proper functioning of our trade 
laws. The safeguard, countervailing duty, and anti-dumping laws are 
vital to the manufacturing sector of our economy. They are often the 
first and last line of defense for U.S. industries injured by unfairly 
or illegally traded imports. Companies, workers, families, and 
communities rely heavily on these laws to prevent the ill-effects of 
unfair trade by our trading partners.
  Unfortunately, recent events like the steel import crisis have 
demonstrated how painfully inadequate our current trade laws are in 
responding to rapid import surges. The flooding of U.S. markets with 
unfairly or illegally traded steel has caused severe and irreparable 
harm to our steelworkers, their families, and communities, and it is 
high time we revisit our trade laws in an effort to make our laws more 
responsive to the changing realities of the global economy. In the case 
of steel, I refer to the problem of foreign steel overcapacity that 
continually finds its way into the open U.S. market where it seriously 
injures our domestic steel manufacturers.
  The reforms we are proposing today fall into three categories. Title 
I of the act improves the ability of our safeguard laws, often referred 
to as section 201, to adequately respond to import surges such as the 
flood of cheap steel that began to hit U.S. shores in 1997 and has not 
yet abated. Section 201 allows U.S. producers to obtain relief from 
serious injury that is substantially caused by imports even in the 
absence of unfair trade. However, the current U.S. safeguard standard 
for proving that a U.S. industry has been seriously injured by imports 
is stricter than the corresponding standard in the WTO Safeguards 
Agreement, a discrepancy which places U.S. manufacturers at a 
disadvantage with regard to their foreign trading partners. Whereas a 
foreign producer must prove only that an import surge, like the current 
steel import crisis, is a cause of injury, domestic producers are 
hindered by our trade laws which require our domestic industry to prove 
that the imports are a substantial cause of injury.

  This inequity hampers the ability of our domestic industries to 
obtain relief from unfairly traded imports and creates an unequal 
playing field on which

[[Page S5800]]

our foreign trading partners have an advantage. It also contributes to 
making the U.S. the premiere dumping ground for illegal and unfairly 
traded imports, particularly in the case of steel. Our trading partners 
know the U.S. injury standard is high, and they exploit that fact. 
Title I simply brings the U.S. safeguard law with respect to the injury 
test into line with the WTO standard, thereby putting our domestic 
industries on equal footing with the rest of the world. Title I also 
contains other language to make section 201 more effective, such as 
provisions that expand the availability of early and meaningful 
provisional relief and more rapidly and effectively address import 
surges.
  Title II of this legislation updates our anti-dumping and 
countervailing duty laws to make them more effective for a rapidly-
changing marketplace. First, the bill makes it tougher for our trading 
partners to circumvent an anti-dumping or countervailing duty order. No 
longer will foreign nations be able to skirt around our laws by making 
slight alterations to the products they are exporting to the U.S. This 
legislation clarifies that antidumping and countervailing duty orders 
include products that have been changed in only minor respects.
  In addition, the bill provides that the ITC cannot conclude that 
imports do not have a significant effect on domestic prices simply on 
the basis of the magnitude or stability of the volume of imports. This 
allows the Commission to take into account the fact that in some cases 
and for some industries, even small volumes of imports can have 
significant price effects and negatively impact the domestic industry.
  Title III creates a steel import monitoring program designed to act 
as an early notification system when imports begin flooding the U.S. 
market. When the steel import surge began in July 1997, it was many 
months, even close to a year, before anyone in the administration would 
even admit that there was a spike in imports that was potentially 
harmful to the domestic industry. During that time, companies went 
bankrupt and thousands of steelworkers were laid off.
  These provisions will make it easier to track imports and provide 
much quicker notification of potentially harmful import surges. Quite 
simply, the sooner we learn of unfair import surges, the sooner the 
administration, Congress, and the industry itself can take the 
necessary steps to provide steelworkers and steel companies with the 
relief they deserve.
  By recognizing the changed reality of the international marketplace 
and how quickly import surges become major crises, the bill being 
introduced today provides much needed improvements of our trade laws. 
Too many of the current provisions designed to provide relief to our 
domestic manufacturing sector have been antiquated by recent changes in 
the global economy and the structure of international trade. It is time 
we reaffirm our commitment to our manufacturing base by updating and 
enhancing the very laws designed to protect U.S. manufacturers from 
unfair and illegal imports from abroad. The Trade Law Reform Act of 
2001 does just that.
  Once again, I must reiterate that only an immediate section 201 on 
steel can preserve basic steelmaking capacity in the United States. 
While this bill cannot solve the steel crisis by itself, it does 
represent a significant step in the right direction.
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