Life Savers Are Job Losers

The Holland, Mich., Life Savers workers losing their jobs to Canadians should thank Congress for perpetuating artificially high sugar prices in the United States through high tariffs on imported sugar (“Workers Feel Like Suckers,” March 20). In trying to prop up a few jobs in sugar-producing states, Congress is merely causing economic dislocation of the kind causing the Life Savers factory to move across the border. The tariff that saves one person’s job is the tariff that kills other jobs.

James A. Gorton

Pasadena

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As I read the sad story of the more bitter than sweet goodbye to Life Savers, I kept looking for mention of Cuba. The economic squeeze that forced the move from the U.S. to Canada surely had something to do, I thought, with the fact that Cuban sugar is embargoed to the U.S. but Canada buys all it can use at a much lower cost than we can buy domestic sugar.

I had to wait until I got to “Stopping the Cuban Vacation Crisis” in the same edition to find the angle that was missing on the front page. Steve Lopez, as he does so frequently, exposed irony and hypocrisy, this time in the form of our anti-Cuban policy.

How costly in so many ways is our petty paranoia where our struggling neighbor 90 miles from the southeastern-most tip of the U.S. is concerned.

Bob Brigham

Manhattan Beach

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Americans should boycott Life Savers after Kraft moves the plant to Canada. The move is about money, and corporations understand more when it hits their profits. We must do something to keep our people working. Kraft closed the company; I’m not going to buy Kraft products.

Jan Giannunzio

North Hills