Since

the advent of free trade agreements like NAFTA, the U.S. has lost hundreds of

thousands of manufacturing jobs abroad to countries that pay little more than

lip service to worker protection and environmental standards. For the most

part, corporate America has responded with yawning indifference, arguing that

American workers need to “adapt and evolve” to a changing global marketplace

and retrain themselves for higher skilled jobs. 

The

result has been the hollowing out of many communities throughout California and

the country as jobs move offshore and tax bases dissipate.

These

days, there seems to be no winning, for even where American workers have honed

the most advanced technological skills anywhere in the world, our government

still seems poised to kick them in the teeth. The U.S. commercial aerospace

industry, the envy of the world and the last stronghold of American

manufacturing, is a prime example.

The

Europeans, particularly the French, have been engaged in what is widely

regarded in the U.S. as an illegal and systematic effort to steal jobs and

market share from American aerospace workers and firms by dumping more than

$100 billion in subsidies into their French-based aerospace company Airbus.

“We’ll

win by any means necessary,” pronounced the French prime minister a few years

ago. And they’ve been effective with this gambit, gaining nearly 50 percent of

the market while the American-based manufacturer Boeing was forced to shed

65,000 American jobs.

For

its part, the Bush administration has rightly responded by filing the largest

lawsuit in the history of the World Trade Organization against the European

Union. But the Bush administration is taking one step forward and two steps

backwards. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Defense is today poised to

countermand the administration’s own trade negotiators by insisting that Airbus

be one of the two competitors in the award for the U.S. Air Force’s crown jewel

of airframe contracts — a $40 billion tanker aerial refueling contract.

Boeing’s

tanker jet is clearly the state of the art, having gained the lions’ share of

customers worldwide and having shown an impressive track record in its service

of U.S. troops. The Boeing tanker is American-made and would never be held up

or left unsupported by a country whose government suddenly went from ally to

enemy. An award to the American manufacturer could support 44,000 jobs and

hundreds of communities here at home. In California, this contract would mean

4,000 jobs and more than $175 million in annual revenue.

But,

if Airbus wins the contract, the Department of Defense will create tens of

thousands of jobs in France and reward the very company that our trade representatives

have sued as rogue violators of trade laws. 

Without

a doubt, the Department of Defense needs to replace its refueling aircraft — a

point on which there is broad agreement. But after understandable outrage on

Capitol Hill over Boeing’s no-bid contract for the tanker replacement aircraft

in 2003, a once-criticized Department of Defense has this time perhaps

over-reacted and gone to the other extreme, insisting that the award must be

done on a competitive basis. The result is that a heavily subsidized European

manufacturer will be able to compete with the benefit of billions in government

subsidies against a U.S. manufacturer that receives no subsidies. 

This

is not to say American aerospace manufacturers should get carte blanche simply

because of the tremendous value they provide to the American economy and

military base. Indeed, unions such as the International Association of

Machinists often fight to hold these companies accountable at the bargaining

table on matters relating to health care, wages, jobs and benefits. But the

tanker contract is about something different, and specifically whether the

European Union should be able to win U.S. defense contracts with what are

clearly lesser but heavily subsidized products. 

Once

considered the “arsenal of democracy,” America’s manufacturing base has shrunk

so dramatically in the last 40 years that in 2003 it even faced a shortage of

the most basic defense materiel — ammunition — forcing the U.S. government to

resort to foreign suppliers in Israel, Taiwan and Britain. The kind of blind

outsourcing of critical defense items gives foreign suppliers the equivalent of

a veto power on U.S. national security matters.

To

a divided Washington bureaucracy, it seems impossible to reconcile free trade

with competitive contracting. However, just as American workers have retrained

themselves for higher skilled jobs, bureaucrats must retrain themselves as

well. Competition may be the fuel of excellence, but if one team is on

steroids, then the cause of competition is hopelessly distorted.  

This

aerial refueling tanker decision is about jobs, jobs for machinists, engineers,

programmers and thousands of others in a critical economic supply chain. That

supply chain can support the U.S. military and industrial bases in communities

all across the country — from Washington, California, Ohio, Illinois, Florida

and Alabama — or it can support jobs and communities in France. The choice is

ours.

Rich Michalski is

general vice president of the International Association of Machinists and

Aerospace Workers.