Ohio Senators Brown, Portman Call For Tariffs on Chinese Imported Saw Blades

ELYRIA — Federal regulators should protect diamond saw blade makers from unfair Chinese trade, Ohio’s two senators said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican, have urged the U.S. Department of Commerce to use available data to determine tariffs on Chinese diamond saw blades.

The tariffs on imported blades will prevent "dumping" of blades into the U.S. market and protect domestic companies, including Diamond Products in Elyria, from unfair competition, according to the senators.

"We urge the department to reconsider which financial data to use, consistent with U.S. trade law, to ensure that the department is able to accurately calculate the margin of dumping," the senators wrote in a letter to Paul Piquado, assistant secretary for enforcement and compliance in the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration.

"Moreover, as a general matter, we urge the Department to disregard financial statements from companies that use prison labor, as such financial data distorts the full cost of production and sales," Brown and Portman’s letter said.

In determining appropriate tariffs for Chinese goods, the Commerce Department must first obtain the cost of making those products. To do so, it utilizes data from a "surrogate country" that has a similar gross national income, or GNI, per capita as China and that is a significant producer of identical or comparable merchandise to the product being analyzed, according to the senators. 

In the case of the diamond saw blades, the department is using information from Thailand. 

"In its preliminary results, however, DOC claimed there was no usable financial information from a Thai company regarding diamond saw blades or comparable products," according to the senators. 

"DOC is therefore using financial information from a company in the Philippines that reportedly uses prison labor to make comparable merchandise," such as cemented carbide tipped circular saws. 

Brown and Portman wrote to DOC to urge the agency to consider this and all other information in order to protect Elyria’s Diamond Products from unfair competition.

The letter is not the first time Ohio’s senators teamed up to advocate for Diamond Products. In 2011, Brown and Portman successfully urged the Commerce Department to recalculate anti-dumping duties for a Chinese diamond saw blade company whose imports were in direct competition with those made by the Elyria company. 

The senators also have been outspoken in calling for protections against dumping of Chinese steel pipe imports that compete with the pipes made by U.S. Steel for use in oil and natural gas exploration--iAbrasive report.

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