Wild. And the unions who argue against free-tradeism are the bad guys?
Labor is almost always the largest contributor to any business’s costs and offshoring it is very popular with capital, so waving away the 75% American crew requirement as “not about the workers” is wrong. From a DOT study, in 2010 an American crew costs 5x what a foreign crew does.
I live in Hawaii and while I don’t like paying more to subsidize US domestic shipbuilding (if the government wants to subsidize our shipyards, they should do it themselves), but when the major voices advocating for this (in Hawaii) are Republicans, libertarians, and business-oriented Democrats like Ed Case (one can argue those aren’t really three separate categories), I get wary. Because this sure looks like every other time capital wanted to stop having to pay so many expensive Americans with their benefits and labor protections when they could instead offload to foreign workers without any of that. And they pinky swear promise they’ll give us cheaper stuff in return rather than just pocketing the difference.