Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers (USW - United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union) is in his second full term since being elected in 2005.

The USW, the largest manufacturing union in North America,represents 1.2 million active and retired industrial and service sector workers in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Under Leo's leadership, the USW’s executive board launched a nationwide mobilization to gain congressional support for health insurance reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, the economic stimulus bill that includes a ‘Buy American’ provision to promote job creation, and climate protection legislation that serves working families.

In 2008, he signed a merger agreement creating the first trans-Atlantic union with leaders of the UK-based manufacturing union called Unite. The new global union, ‘Workers Uniting’ (www.workersuniting.org), is a fully functional and registered trade union in the UK, U.S., Ireland and Canada.

He serves on the AFL-CIO's Executive Council (www.aflcioi.org), where he chairs the AFL-CIO's Public Policy Committee. He serves on the U.S. National Commission on Energy Policy, and is a charter board member of the Apollo Alliance (www.apolloalliance.org), a non-profit public policy initiative for creating good jobs in pursuit of energy independence.

Gerard is a founding partner in 2006 with the Sierra Club of the Blue Green Alliance (www.bluegreenalliance.org), which today includes the Natural Resources Defense Council and four other unions dedicated to expanding jobs in the green economy. He also helped create the Washington-based Alliance for American Manufacturing (www.americanmanufacturing.org), a unique non-partisan, non-profit partnership forged to strengthen manufacturing in the U.S. that’s made up of America's leading manufacturers and the USW.

Blog Entries by Leo W. Gerard

Some Jobs Taxpayers Don't Need to Buy

1 Comments | Posted December 2, 2009 | 09:10 PM (EST)


Can't buy me love
Everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love
No, no, no, no

From the 1964 Lennon/McCartney song, "Can't Buy Me Love"

Maybe you can't buy love, but you can buy a job.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it with...

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CEOs, Union Leader Agree: Manufacturing Strategy Crucial

9 Comments | Posted December 2, 2009 | 11:13 AM (EST)


Defying popular stereotype, CEOs and labor representatives sat on a panel and largely agreed on major issues confronting industry and working people.

It happened Monday, Nov. 30 as CNBC taped Meeting of the Minds: Rebuilding America in a hall at Carnegie Mellon University before an audience of nearly 600...

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Gone with the Wind: Blowing U.S. Tax Dollars Off Shore

28 Comments | Posted November 19, 2009 | 10:49 AM (EST)


It turns out a Texas windmill farm developer's request last month for nearly half a billion dollars in stimulus funds to create 2,000 jobs in China doesn't rank first on the audacity scale.

Shockingly for American taxpayers, and sadly for the staggering 10.2 percent of Americans who are unemployed,...

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Business Council Honors Vale CEO for Clipping Workers, Wacking Towns

3 Comments | Posted November 16, 2009 | 03:09 PM (EST)


A business group is honoring Roger Agnelli, the CEO of Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world, which, coincidentally, is in the midst of its longest ever labor dispute. The award is for exceptional accomplishments in corporate social responsibility.

The Business Council for International Understanding will...

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Hell No! We Won't Send Our Tax Dollars to China

36 Comments | Posted November 6, 2009 | 02:47 PM (EST)


Taking candy from a baby: A consortium of Chinese and American companies goes to Washington and announces plans to build a $1.5 billion windmill farm in West Texas using $450 million in U.S. Stimulus funds, which will create 2,330 jobs - 2,000 of them in China.

The baby --...

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Wiping Blood Off White Buck Shoes

3 Comments | Posted October 22, 2009 | 04:36 PM (EST)


In New York, the oldest and snobbiest financial and advising ventures are called "white shoe" firms.

This, they say, arose from the days when their hoity-toity employees wore white bucks to work.

These days, white shoe firms bear names notorious outside New York, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan...

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Democrats: Stop Kissing Elephant Trunk and Reform Health Insurance Right

3 Comments | Posted October 16, 2009 | 04:06 PM (EST)


The meeting got testy. Voices rose last Thursday among Democrats over differences in the Senate Finance and Health committee versions of insurance reform.

Max Baucus defended his committee's bill, voted out last week with one Republican, but lacking a public option and burdening the middle class. He said, according...

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"Anything Goes" Capitalism Destroys Companies and Workers' Lives

25 Comments | Posted October 7, 2009 | 04:37 PM (EST)


In the title tune to the 1934 musical Anything Goes,"Cole Porter says "times have changed," since the stock market crashed in 1929, but the super rich, like John D. Rockefeller Jr., "still can hoard enough money to let Max Gordon produce his shows."

The lyrics also tease...

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Los Angeles Times to Colombia: Prosecute Corporate Supporters of Terrorism

3 Comments | Posted October 3, 2009 | 06:19 PM (EST)


In an Oct. 1 editorial, the Los Angeles Times echoes the sentiment that the United Steelworkers union has been expressing for years -- corporate supporters of paramilitaries in Colombia who murder trade unionists must be held criminally accountable.

Specifically, the Los Angeles Times is applauding the order of...

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Enforcing the Rule of Trade Law

22 Comments | Posted September 25, 2009 | 11:44 AM (EST)


My union, the United Steelworkers (USW), and three paper manufacturers will have free traders and editorial boards across the nation sputtering, spitting and name calling again this week.

They started labeling us "protectionist" last week when President Obama made what should have been considered a straightforward decision. He implemented...

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Obama Plans to Reform Economy, Not Just Health Insurance

63 Comments | Posted September 16, 2009 | 02:17 PM (EST)


Let's go back, just for a minute, to a time before screaming teabaggers, before Republicans decided to kill health insurance reform as a means to politically destroy this country's first African-American president.

Try and remember what it was like before discussion of health insurance reform raised voices, a time...

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New Reason for Devotion to Employee Free Choice Act

3 Comments | Posted September 15, 2009 | 11:07 AM (EST)


Norma Rae and Teddy Kennedy are dead.

Well, the woman on whom the 1979 Academy Award winning movie Norma Rae was based -- Crystal Lee Sutton -- died Sept. 12. Sen. Kennedy died just weeks earlier on Aug. 25.

Brain cancer felled both iconic labor heroes.

It was a...

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Finally, a President with the Guts to Enforce Trade Laws

51 Comments | Posted September 13, 2009 | 01:49 PM (EST)


Barack Obama proved Friday he's got grit. He enforced trade laws.

These are special trade safeguard rules called "Section 421" that the Chinese had agreed to obey to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are, however, laws that had gone unenforced by the U.S. in the past.

...
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Too High a Price for High Octane

15 Comments | Posted September 6, 2009 | 09:58 PM (EST)


No more than a thimbleful of hydrofluoric acid killed 37-year-old Alcoa technician John L. Dorton in fewer than seven hours from the moment he inhaled the mist at the plant where he worked in Port Comfort, Texas.

It's that deadly.

Its transportation to factories and its use there...

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Fomenting a Green Industrial Revolution in the U.S.

5 Comments | Posted September 2, 2009 | 05:01 PM (EST)


When the leaders of the G-20 nations arrive in Pittsburgh, I want them to know I am fomenting revolution -- Industrial revolution. Specifically, a 21st-century burgeoning of green manufacturing in the United States.

Americans going green -- manufacturing windmills and solar cells -- would benefit the whole world's economy...

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The Republican "Do Not Resuscitate" Plan to Let Medicare Die

69 Comments | Posted August 21, 2009 | 04:16 PM (EST)


During a webcast meeting with Organizing for America on Thursday, President Barack Obama outed the covert Republican plot to strangle Medicare to financial death.

He explained to the group that if Congress does nothing, if health care reform fails, "Medicare will run out of money in eight years."

...
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What A Jobless Recovery Today Means For Tomorrow?

32 Comments | Posted August 17, 2009 | 09:57 PM (EST)


The three of us -- the president of the United Steelworkers from Pittsburgh, a Corporate CEO now living in New York, and the former senior U.S. Senator from Michigan -- wrote in this space on August 5 about the jobless economic recovery we believe the nation is in, one...

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Speak Up to Stop Unfair Trade

29 Comments | Posted August 12, 2009 | 09:19 PM (EST)


They came first for the Communists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist....
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It's All About Jobs!

71 Comments | Posted August 5, 2009 | 11:52 AM (EST)


What brings together the President of the United Steelworkers from Pittsburgh, a Corporate CEO now living in New York, and the former senior U.S. Senator from Michigan?

It's all about jobs -- and the urgent need for millions of new ones.

While President Obama has spoken forcefully about...

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Q and A with Peter Navarro: Macroeconomic Expert and Best-Selling Author on China

Posted August 4, 2009 | 05:40 PM (EST)


Leo W. Gerard: Your chapter in the new book, Benchmarking the Advantages Foreign Nationals Provide their Manufacturers, describes in devastating detail how China in particular, but also other major U.S. trading partners, violate international rules. The abuses you document make clear that it's impossible for American manufactures to compete internationally....

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