PACE Union President Comments On DuPont Restructur
Nashville, TN, Dec. 8--In a statement released today, Boyd Young, president of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical, and Energy Workers International Union (PACE), expressed concern over DuPont's announcement that it would slash jobs in the U.S. and Western Europe and shift operations to China and Eastern Europe. PACE currently represents 2,000 workers in six DuPont facilities.
"I believe that DuPont's union and non-union employees will see this announcement as just another example of this company's disregard for the thousands of workers and their communities who built this company," said Young. "We will certainly be challenging this restructuring plan, and believe DuPont workers understand that this is a global challenge requiring greater worker power. No one can fight this alone."
To date, DuPont has invested a total of $700 million in China and built 23 solely invested or joint-venture facilities there. The company employs 3,000 Chinese workers. Other U.S. and Western European chemical companies are also investing heavily in China, which has raised concerns among trade unionists that China will some day become a major exporter of chemicals as companies abandon industrialized countries and their workers. In 2002, the U.S. became a net importer of chemicals for the first time since the country's chemical industry was developed. The result, according to PACE, will be dependence on China for chemicals needed to sustain the overall economy and maintain national security.
Although DuPont has signed onto the United Nation's Global Compact, it is notable that the company has yet to incorporate the compact's mandates covering labor rights into its own mission statement.
"After centuries of isolationist policy, China is now open for business and foreign companies, like DuPont, want to take advantage of poverty-level wages, sweatshops, prison labor and non-existent environmental restrictions while abandoning their plants and communities in the U.S. and Western Europe," said Young. "While we understand new plants will be built abroad as economies develop, the real question is who benefits--certainly not workers in China, where real unions are nonexistent, or workers in the U.S., where good jobs in the chemical industry are fast disappearing. We expect to see the U.S. flooded with cheap and perhaps unsafe chemical imports from abroad in the not too distant future.
"This announcement makes it perfectly clear that DuPont's number one priority is profit and not its people. We are going to demand a change in that priority and fight to put a human face on DuPont," said Young.
PACE represents 300,000 workers in the paper, oil, chemical, atomic energy, auto parts, grain milling, cement, and industrial minerals industries.
