Added Oct. 11

Trade issue could sway votes
in some House districts

By RAJU CHEBIUM and GREG WRIGHT
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Shirley Chapmon, a laid-off textile worker in Concord, N.C., won’t vote next month to re-elect her congressman, Republican Rep. Robin Hayes, though she has supported him before.

Chapmon is upset at Hayes for being a deciding vote when the House voted 215-214 in December to give President Bush the authority to negotiate trade agreements with other nations. Even though Hayes later voted against the final trade compromise with the Senate, Chapmon won’t forget.

“We’re losing jobs here in America,” said Chapmon, a Democrat. “The people (overseas) are working for cheaper pay.”

Hayes, a textile magnate, says that while he supported the so-called fast-track trade legislation, he did get important protection for textile workers in his 8th Congressional District in later legislation. He said other issues, like national security, also are important, and to suggest he doesn’t care about textile workers is “absolutely absurd.”

With the nation focused on terrorism and a possible war in Iraq, international trade is cutting narrowly but deeply in the 2002 congressional elections.

In many places, being for free and open trade is a political plus. But in a handful of districts and states where unions are strong and manufacturing plants are closing down or laying off workers, it could hurt incumbents who supported free-trade agreements or help those who opposed them.

“At least 95 percent of the voters don't know about or could care less about trade issues,” said Stephen D. Cohen, an international relations professor at American University. “But in a handful of congressional districts, if there happens to be a very large steel mill or a very large textile mill, it could be a factor.”

In March, unions applauded when President Bush slapped tariffs as high as 30 percent on hundreds of steel imports to prop up the ailing U.S. industry. But they grew angry when Bush exempted tariffs on 25 percent of the products after the European Union and other trade partners protested.

Other House races where international trade could be an important issue:

— In Mississippi’s newly drawn 3rd District, Democratic Rep. Ronnie Shows is criticizing Republican Rep. Chip Pickering for supporting the trade bill. Shows said trade deals cost Mississippi auto parts, fishing, lumber and textile jobs. Pickering argues that he worked with Bush to get Russia to repeal a ban on U.S. poultry and to stop Canada from selling cheap lumber in the United States.

— In Ohio’s 6th District, where the nation’s steel problems have hit home, incumbent Rep. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, is using Republican support for free trade against challenger Mike Halleck.

North Carolina, the nation’s leading textile producer, has lost 133,000 jobs since the North American Free Trade Agreement became law in 1994, said Paul Blank, campaign manager for Hayes’ opponent, Chris Kouri.

Unemployment in the district ranges from 5.7 percent to 11.9 percent, said Peter Neenan of the North Carolina Employment Security Commission. Last month’s national rate was 5.6 percent.

But Hayes said he tried to soften any future textile losses by helping to pass amendments to a later spending bill requiring South American companies to use fabric dyed, finished and printed in the United States to preserve 100,000 domestic jobs and create new markets.

Hayes voted against the final trade bill that emerged from House-Senate negotiations because it allowed foreign nations to use more non-U.S. fabric to make clothes exported to this country. He was one of 28 Republicans to vote against the final version, which Congress passed and President Bush signed into law on Aug. 6.

The AFL-CIO, which criticized Hayes for his yes vote, thanked him for his no vote the second time around. But other unions weren’t placated and plan to remind voters of Hayes’ December vote.

“He is a guy whose family’s fortune is from textiles. His district has been rocked by layoffs and plant closings,” said Chris Chafe, a spokesman for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. ”He, more than any person in Congress, should have understood the damage.”