More than 4 million jobs could be lost if climate-change regulation forces U.S. manufacturers to non-competitiveness, the United Steelworkers (USW) says.

On Friday USW International President Leo Gerard joined others in unveiling a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) which shows a state-by-state breakdown of 4.1 million jobs at risk “unless Congress maintains international competitiveness by enacting measures to help energy-intensive and trade-sensitive manufacturers deal with new climate change standards and to prevent what is called carbon leakage,” the USW said.

“The 4 million vulnerable jobs in this report are not just in the Midwest but spread out among all 50 states,” Gerard said. “Two states most at risk of losing jobs are Texas and California. We must recognize it’s not Pittsburgh warming or Chicago warming but global warming.”

Carbon leakage is the effect of other countries which do not have environmental standards and use the economic advantage as a subsidy to steal U.S. jobs, the USW added.

“We’re very concerned about any bill that doesn’t have a comprehensive set of policies to prevent carbon and job leakage,” Gerard said. “Such a package must include border adjustments to prod other countries into sharing the responsibility to address climate change as well as transition assistance rebates and access to capital that will allow at-risk manufacturers to become more energy efficient.”

The Top 10 most energy-intensive industries, as cited by the EPI report, are steel, pulp and paper, basic chemicals, non-metallic mineral products, petroleum refining, glass, clay, textile mills, cement, and aluminum production. “When combined, these industries employed 1.2 million workers in 2006 and emitted 813 million tons of carbon,” the USW said. “Approximately 1.7 million manufacturing jobs and supported by production in these industries.

“In total, more than 4.1 million jobs are supported by these carbon-intensive industries, undermined by unfair trade agreements where imports exceeded 15 percent of domestic output for seven of them,” the USW said.

But the EPI report also found that “climate change legislation that creates a level playing field for American manufacturing could create more than 1 million jobs in the two years following passage, with millions more in the following years,” the USW said.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said, “We need to maintain a level playing field for American manufacturing. For a clean energy bill to be successful, it must also be a jobs bill. Done right, efforts to reduce carbon emissions can revitalize our nation’s manufacturing base to create new clean energy jobs. But that means a bill that invests in the economic competitiveness of domestic manufacturing and prevents jobs from moving to countries with weaker environmental standards.”

Said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, “We need to prevent rogue countries that don’t play by the rules from becoming a magnet for energy intensive industries. Climate change legislation must level the playing field.”

The full report can be found at www.epi.org

The USW is North America’s largest industrial union, representing 850,000 actively employed workers in metals, mining, pulp and paper, rubber, chemicals, glass, auto supply, and the energy producing industries.

Posted 10/5/2009