Minnesota’s Mark Dayton wants the White House to address the steel crisis.
The National Governors Association is meeting this weekend in Washington, DC. One of the governors – Minnesota’s Mark Dayton – is scheduled to meet with President Obama, and he’s got one thing on his mind: the steel import crisis.
According to Minnesota media, steel dumping is “the no. 1 issue” on Dayton’s plate this weekend:
"We are going to push on the issue of restricting foreign steel imports," Dayton told reporters Wednesday shortly after talking to Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad about the issue.
Imports of dirt-cheap and heavily subsidized Chinese steel have been surged into the United States in 2015, capturing nearly 30 percent of the American steel market. That led to plant closures and steelworker layoffs across the country. Minnesota, whose Iron Range supplies the raw ingredients for steel-making, has seen a lot of those closures and layoffs – it was even the subject of a recent front-page Washington Post story. But even as Chinese steel dumping roils economies and workers around the world, it doesn’t show signs of abating.
Dayton, with a bipartisan assist from Iowa’s Terry Branstad, is calling on the Obama administration do something about that. He’s going to be lobbying other governors while in DC to join him in pressing the president to institute tougher anti-dumping duties.
For the sake of America’s steelworkers, it can’t come too soon.