WASHINGTON – Domestic mattress manufacturers and foam producers are getting some backing from three U.S. senators offering support for the antidumping petition filed last summer against 13 countries.

In a letter addressed to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and David Johnson, chairman of the International Trade Commission, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., urged action from the agencies on the petition, saying the “U.S. cannot afford to continue losing jobs and entire industries due to foreign trade cheats. American workers are the best in the world but cannot compete with illegally dumped imports.”

Written in support of “the American mattress industry and the thousands of workers employed by U.S. mattress producers,” the senators asked the commerce secretary and the ITC chairman to rule in favor of the 10 domestic mattress makers and two labor unions that filed the original petition in July.

“They represent more than 8,000 workers across 35 states and have been manufacturing mattresses for more than a century. Across the industry, more than 12,000 workers are employed by American mattress producers, and thousands of manufacturing jobs in the mattress supply chain depend on a robust domestic industry. These jobs are at risk due to unfairly-traded imports from foreign competitors,” the letter said.

The Department of Commerce announced its affirmative preliminary determinations in the case in February. Slovenia was hit the hardest.

Ten mattress makers partnered with two labor unions in July to file the petition citing mattress imports from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Burma, India, Italy, Kosovo, Mexico, Philippines, Poland, Slovenia, Spain and Taiwan. A countervailing petition was filed against mattress imports from Indonesia.

The petitioners are: Brooklyn Bedding LLC; Carpenter Co.; Corsicana Mattress Co.; Future Foam; FXI; Kolcraft Enterprises; Leggett & Platt; Serta Simmons Bedding; Southerland; Tempur Sealy International; The International Brotherhood of Teamsters; and the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Services Workers International Union, AFL-CIO.

The three senators went on to say in the letter that dumped and subsidized mattress imports have been “harming U.S. mattress manufacturers for almost a decade, already causing more than 50 mattress producers to go out of business since 2016.”

“The Department of Commerce and U.S. International Trade Commission have, on two separate prior occasions, issued antidumping and countervailing duty orders on companies found to be skirting U.S. trade law and flooding our market with lower than fair market value mattresses,” the letter continued. “Unfortunately, more action is necessary, as the same cheap mattresses are now being imported from a new batch of countries.”

See also:

• Commerce Department to investigate mattress imports from 13 countries
• DOC antidumping decision polarizes bedding industry

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