Vietnam agreement unsettling for textiles
By Susan M. Andrews -- Furniture Today, May 19, 2003
Washington — Textile leaders say the U.S. government betrayed the domestic textile industry when it signed a bilateral trade agreement with Vietnam on April 25, caving in to pressure from big-box retailers after promising restraint in quota negotiations.
At a meeting of industry executives last month in High Point, Grant Aldonas, undersecretary of international trade at the U.S. Commerce Department, assured Billy Moore, chairman of the American Textile Manufacturers Institute, that the Bush administration was committed to holding the line on Vietnamese textile imports.
Two days later, Moore said, "they took a 180-degree turn" and agreed to give Vietnam the most generous access to the U.S. textile market ever granted in an initial bilateral textile agreement, virtually guaranteeing more plant closings and job losses in the U.S. textile industry.
The deal accepts Vietnam's huge export growth in 2002 and almost doubles that amount in 2003. In 2001, U.S. textile imports from Vietnam were $49 million; in 2002 they were $852 million; in 2003, they will be worth $1.7 billion as a result of the agreement. These are apparel quotas; no quotas exist for home furnishings fabric such as upholstery covers.
"It is increasingly hard for this industry to reconcile the government's action with the words of Commerce Secretary Evans 14 months ago when he stood before us and said 'We know what you are going through. Know that the textile industry now has a friend in Washington,' " Moore said.
"Whether Grant Aldonas knew what he was telling us was not the truth doesn't matter," he said. "He's a government official, just like the trade representatives who promised us their commitment and then took it away. The big-box retailers' money got in the way."
Another trade association, the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, said the government knowingly based the quota levels on fraudulent numbers, inflated through illegal textile transshipments that were labeled "Made in Vietnam" but actually were made in China.
Roger Milliken, chief executive officer of Milliken & Co. and co-chairman of AMTAC, said, "The quota levels in this agreement will severely damage and further disrupt the U.S. textile and apparel industries."
Augustine Tantillo, AM-TAC's Washington coordinator, said, "U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick had a clear choice. On one hand was the interest of nearly 1 million U.S. textile and apparel workers. On the other was the interest of large retailers who want to pad their profits by importing cheap Vietnamese goods made by laborers who get paid pennies an hour. Zoellick chose to cave to the retailers."
AMTAC says Vietnam is now the fastest-growing overall supplier to the U.S. market, moving from the 36th to the sixth-largest apparel supplier in one year.
