U.S. Makers of TV Sets Lose Final Appeal on ‘Dumping’
The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed the final appeals of American television makers who claimed that they were the victims of “dumping” of low-priced Japanese TV sets here.
The high court action ends a 17-year legal battle but may spur efforts in Congress to toughen laws against foreign firms that sell their products in this country at prices lower than they are sold at home.
The Antidumping Act of 1916 requires an American firm to show not only that a foreign firm is selling its products here at “a price substantially less than the actual market value” but also that this is done “with the intent of destroying or injuring an industry in the United States.”
A suit by the Zenith Corp. and National Union Electric Corp. charged that Japanese firms were selling their sets here at prices as much as 60% below those in Japan and that this practice was destroying U.S. television manufacturing. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia agreed with both of these charges but concluded that the evidence did not prove “an intent to injure” the American firms.
Last March, on a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. companies had not proven a conspiracy by the Japanese companies to monopolize the American TV market. And on Monday, the justices upheld the appeals court decision dismissing the dumping charges.
The long-running case had been seen as the best test of whether American companies could use U.S. courts to fight the invasion of their domestic markets by foreign firms. Between 1973 and 1983, the number of American jobs in the television-set manufacturing industry fell from 41,434 to 18,023.
Lawyers for a coalition of 80 U.S. manufacturers and unions say that the court ruling illustrates the need to change the laws and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) is sponsoring legislation that would drop the “intent” requirement in the 1916 act.
Some legal experts on anti-dumping laws say that the federal courts have been properly skeptical of claims that foreign firms have conspired against American companies.
“I agree that the courts are not reading the laws generously (for the U.S. firms), but I think they are reading them correctly,” Stanford University Law Prof. Tom Campbell said. The laws were intended to protect U.S. firms against conspiracies to undercut prices, not simply against the lower prices of more efficient producers, he noted.
