Photo By Petty Officer 1st Class Jared Mancuso | WASHINGTON (Sept. 17, 2024) Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro met with President...... read more read more
Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro met with the President of the United Steelworkers Mr. David McCall, and President of the Wessel Group, Mr. Michael Wessel, September 17.
Discussions were wide-ranging and very productive. Secretary Del Toro congratulated Mr. McCall and Mr. Wessel for their leadership in the Section 301 petition brought by five labor unions to U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai earlier this year, seeking relief against anticompetitive Chinese practices in the global commercial shipbuilding market.
Mr. McCall and Mr. Wessel expressed their appreciation for Secretary Del Toro’s ongoing efforts to attract world-class shipbuilders from overseas allies to invest in integrated commercial and naval shipbuilding facilities in the United States, and to encourage legacy U.S. shipbuilders to invest in workforce expansion, wage increases, and facility improvements to bolster skilled worker retention, quality of service, and productivity.
Secretary Del Toro reflected, “Mr. McCall and Mr. Wessel are visionary leaders and essential partners in our Maritime Statecraft efforts to renew America’s comprehensive maritime power. Unions made this country the world’s foremost shipbuilder in the 20th century, and with their support we will do so again in the 21st century.”
During their engagement, Secretary Del Toro, Mr. McCall and Mr. Wessel discussed ongoing outreach to leading global shipping and shipbuilding firms to encourage additional investment in the U.S. maritime industry and workforce. They conferred on ways to leverage existing financing mechanisms and incentives such as the Department of Energy’s and Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing and Title 17 Clean Energy Financing Programs as well as the Department of Transportation’s dormant but unfunded Title 46 Construction Differential Subsidies. They pledged to work together to bring to bear additional resources, including seeking expanded eligibility of funds under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, as well as new authorities in the forthcoming SHIPS for America Act.
A central pillar of Secretary Del Toro’s Maritime Statecraft strategy is encouraging the growth of the U.S. shipbuilding workforce as well as the modernization of physical infrastructure and production processes across the industry, in part by attracting leading global shipbuilding firms to bring their best practices to American shores.
As Secretary Del Toro observed following meetings with South Korean and Japanese shipbuilders in February, “Investment in dual-use shipyards in the United States will create good paying, blue collar and new-collar American jobs building the advanced ships that will protect and power the economy of tomorrow.”
This approach was validated in June when leading Korean shipbuilder Hanwha announced they had reached an agreement to purchase the Philly Shipyard, with the stated intent of expanding the yard’s facilities, updating its technology, doubling the size of the workforce, and quadrupling the output to compete for both commercial and naval shipbuilding contracts.
As Secretary Del Toro said in his speech to the Naval War College’s Future Warfighting Symposium last month, “I am hopeful that Hanwha will be just the first of many world-class shipbuilders to come to America and take part in our country’s maritime renaissance.”
| Date Taken: | 09.17.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 10.01.2024 17:30 |
| Story ID: | 482270 |
| Location: | DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, US |
| Web Views: | 83 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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