Temporary T-Type Tires Should Be Found Subject to AD on PVLT Tires From Taiwan, Union Says
The United Steelworkers labor union brought a case to the Court of International Trade on Sep. 4 arguing that a Commerce Department scope ruling, which excluded a certain type of temporary tire from antidumping duties on passenger vehicle and light truck tires from Taiwan, had misunderstood the language of the AD order it had drawn from (United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union, AFL-CIO, CLC v. U.S., CIT # 24-00165).
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The department also should have issued a preliminary determination for the scope ruling, as it has discretion to do so, the labor union said.
Specifically, that AD order covered tires that fit passenger vehicles and light trucks “not limited to sizes listed in the TRA Year Book.” However, the labor union said, the department found that importer Cheng Shin Rubber USA’s T-type tire was not subject to the order because “it was of a size not listed in the TRA Year Book” and because “no evidence on the record … suggests the tire in question is of a size that fits passenger cars and light trucks.”
In a letter to Commerce, the United Steelworkers said it “pointed out that Commerce’s determination was plainly incorrect” because it found the plain language of the order to mean that the scope was limited to sizes in the TRA Year Book.
The ruling also relied on prior findings regarding orders on passenger vehicle and light truck tires from China, not Taiwan, but the Chinese orders have different language, the labor union said. Instead, they cover sizes “as long as” a size appeared in the TRA Year Book, “while the purposefully dissimilar language in the scope of the later order on Taiwan was explicitly ‘not limited to’ those sizes,” it said.
And Commerce’s claim that the record held no evidence that the tire in question didn’t fit light trucks or passenger vehicles “was simply not true,” it said, saying the record indicated “exactly that it was a passenger vehicle tire.”