You may have heard: On Friday, the U.S. Department of Commerce placed tariffs on Oil Country Tubular Goods (OCTG) imports from South Korea that it thinks have been “dumped” – priced below fair market value and offloaded into the American market to make a quick buck.
That’s good news for American steelworkers, whose jobs could have been seriously threatened by an adverse ruling from Commerce. They’ve spent months staging rallies to make sure that Washington knew how important it was to get these rules right.
But here’s the thing: It's not over yet. Those tariffs that Commerce announced? Now they go over to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), which will have to confirm them. That means the petitioners in the Commerce case (U.S. Steel and other domestic OCTG makers) will have to prove injury or the threat of injury to their industry. The ITC is holding its pipe-and-tube hearing Tuesday, July 15 in Washington, and its final decision on whether the tariffs should stay or go won’t come until September, according to a Commerce Department fact sheet.
It’s not gonna be easy – some South Korean companies are gearing up to appeal the ruling, and the South Korean government plans to appeal to the World Trade Organization – but nothing is that’s worth fighting for. Stick with the Alliance for American Manufacturing as this trade case moves forward.