Opinion: Dave McCormick isn’t going to fight for steelworkers like me. Just look at his record.

I’m one of the many Pennsylvania union workers you are hearing candidates talking about this election year. I am a retired steelworker, proud member of the United Steelworkers union, and a Navy veteran.

Many candidates running for office across the Commonwealth are promising to stand up for Pennsylvania workers, protect and create jobs, and spur economic growth and opportunities for our next generation.

But not every candidate is being honest with us. It is incumbent upon us to sort through our candidates – and our choices – and determine who is sincere. Who is truly with us in our fight and who is not?

In the Pennsylvania Senate race we are starting to get the answer. 

News reports are revealing stark differences between Senator Bob Casey’s full-throated fight to protect workers’ rights and David McCormick’s lies about his long record of killing and outsourcing American jobs.

Reports, including some from this publication, are illuminating for Pennsylvanians that Mr. McCormick is a wealthy, out-of-state hedge fund executive who has spent his entire career only looking out for his own bottomline and those of his Wall Street friends.

A recent report found that, as CEO of FreeMarkets, McCormick eliminated hundreds of jobs and shipped them to China and India. In pursuing a merger that led to 250 layoffs, Mr. McCormick netted millions of dollars.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Another report uncovered that he laid off and outsourced more than 400 jobs as CEO of Bridgewater Associates using taxpayer dollars.

He also invested up to $92 million in companies that outsourced American jobs, including over 2,600 of which were in Pennsylvania. 

He profited from his aggressive promotion of pro-China trade policies that cost America 2.4 million U.S. jobs – to which Mr. McCormick “showed no concern.”

The most disqualifying for me were his bets against Pennsylvania steelworkers like me.

The Keystone Newsroom reported that Mr. McCormick led Bridgewater Associates while it shorted the stocks of American steel manufacturers – including U.S. Steel based in Pittsburgh – and invested in foreign competitors.

That is on top of hundreds of thousands of dollars he invested in U.S. Steel’s competitor, ArcelorMittal.

It infuriates me that he says he’s trying to save Pennsylvania steelworkers’ union jobs, when his record so clearly shows his leadership cost us our jobs.

David McCormick got rich while U.S. steelworkers got stiffed. It is a common story of Mr. McCormick’s decades-long business career and it is something he’s bragged about on more than one occasion.

In past interviews he bragged about his record of shipping jobs overseas, taught other companies that outsource jobs, and even told attendees at a closed door company event that “I don’t really care” if Pennsylvania jobs are shipped overseas.

The stakes of this election on workers’ rights are incredibly high. Pennsylvania workers cannot afford to have McCormick as our leader in the U.S. Senate.

He frequently lies on the campaign trail by touting himself as a “job creator,” but here’s the truth as I laid out: he has a long record of killing and outsourcing American jobs.

Mr. McCormick would roll back the bipartisan infrastructure law, killing thousands of good-paying jobs in Pennsylvania. He has criticized “Buy American” provisions and refused to support tariffs on China that would help save jobs in Pennsylvania.

He is on the side of greedy corporations that have gutted workers’ rights. Last year, he defended corporate greed and called for permanent tax breaks for big, wealthy corporations.

Meanwhile, Senator Bob Casey has been a champion for workers and organized labor his entire career. He has a record of protecting the right to organize, supporting workers’ and retirees’ pensions, and creating good-paying union jobs across Pennsylvania.

He is fighting to pass the PRO Act, which would help to protect and expand the fundamental rights of workers in America. He helped save thousands of Pennsylvania workers’ and retirees’ pensions as part of the American Rescue Plan and has worked to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour to ensure that all workers can earn a fair wage.

Senator Casey successfully passed the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which are projected to create hundreds of thousands of new, good-paying Pennsylvania jobs over the next decade.

Unlike Mr. McCormick, Senator Casey is more than talk when it comes to protecting steelworkers’ jobs. He spent years advocating the White House to protect Cleveland-Cliffs from unfair trade practices to protect 1,400 union jobs in Western PA and Ohio.

The choice we have before us this November is obvious. We can’t trust David McCormick to have the backs of Pennsylvania workers.