New Trade Agreements Will Offshore Even More American Jobs While Unemployed Continue to Suffer

[RiverLover]

New Trade Agreements Will Offshore Even More American Jobs While Unemployed Continue to Suffer
6/23/15

Millions are still shut out of the labor market.

Over the course of the past year, the unemployment rate has fallen from 6.1 percent to 5.5 percent. This is great news, but more than five years after the recession officially ended, 2.5 million workers have still been unemployed for 6 months or more. There are another 6.5 million workers, who are without work but not counted as unemployed because they have either have become so discouraged they have stopped looking or not searched in the last month.



With millions of Americans out of work, there is “slack” in the labor market, and this means there is little pressure on employer’s to increase wages. Many skilled workers are looking for a paycheck with not enough positions available, so employers do not need to increase wages to attract and retain employees. If the labor market was tighter, wages would grow as employers look to compete in order to attract talent and skills.

As we have reported before, unemployed workers are having a harder time getting back into the workforce than before the recession. The average unemployed person today will spend more than 30 weeks without a job—more than double the average length of unemployment before the Great Recession began....

...For the vast majority of Americans, 30 weeks of unemployment is enough to leave them in financial ruin....

Americans are right to be skeptical of trade agreements. Past trade agreements have cost the United States thousands of jobs. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to create 200,000 American jobs, instead it displaced more than 850,000 jobs. Similarly, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) was supposed to create 70,000 jobs, instead 75,000 jobs were destroyed.

The Obama Administration is currently pushing for the additional authority to negotiate a new trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). So called “fast track” authority would weaken Congress’ ability to shape the details of the trade deal, which would encourage trade with 11 other countries bordering the Pacific including Vietnam and Malaysia.

In addition to rolling back public health and safety protections (i.e. food standards), the TPP is unlikely to create any jobs on net. Trade impacts sectors differently. U.S. manufacturing will almost definitely take a hit from the trade deal, eliminating good-paying, stable union jobs. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “More than 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between 1997 and 2014, and most of those job losses were due to growing trade deficits with countries that have negotiated trade and investment deals with the United States.”...

Read more~
http://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/13470

[Sunlei]

1. not sure what more jobs can be 'offshored', all my major appliances are 'made in Mexico' or China

Almost every American has the same major appliances.

[RiverLover]

2. I've read we've lost 1/3 of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA.

So that means there are still 2/3 left to lose.

Otherwise, why would AFL-CIO care so much? Why would they even exist if there are no jobs to protect?

[Sunlei]

3. how to make business owners pass up $7.00 a DAY mexican border workers? Mexico allows this.

Even with jobs here in the USA.

SeaWorld hires foreign visa students to work at their facilities, all our state parks do similar, florida hires foreign visa workers for jobs that used to go to locals. Florida was number one in unemployed.

Thousands of USA prisoners are paid 20 to 50 cents an hour to work for Corps. That's where thousands of jobs went.

Jobs were offshored decades ago, back when people like Romney build mega stores full of cheap slave labor crap and killed off all local small businesses.

[Fred Sanders]

4. $7 a day "Mexican border workers"? Where? That was funny.

What about those $100 a day Japanese workers, a partner in TPP that dwarfs all the other economies of the TPP combined?

Like Obama I see the big picture, not hordes of job-snatching low-wage Mexican and Vietnamese strawmen.

[Sunlei]

6. perhaps you didn't realize most Americans major appliances are made in Maquiladoras.

One million low wage workers work in those factories located on the border, in Mexico.

[pampango]

5. As has every other developed country since the mid-1990's.

I suppose one could make the case that what happened to everyone else would not have happened to us without NAFTA but it seems unlikely. Our manufacturing employment has been declining since the mid-1950's, while our manufacturing output has soared, largely due to the recovery of shattered WWII economies in Europe and Japan and advancing technology.

The impact of technology on employment in manufacturing is similar, but less significant, than the impact it has had on agricultural employment in the past hundred years. We've gone from a country where more than half of American lived and worked on farms to one where agricultural employment is less than 2% of the labor force. As with our manufacturing output, our agricultural output has soared even while employment levels were dropping drastically.

In 1870, 70-80 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture. As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States#Employment

No one seems to claim that the decline in agricultural employment was due to trade agreements. We recognize the role of technology and mechanization in that revolution. The same force is at work in manufacturing and has affected every developed country.

[Fred Sanders]

9. Major appliance manufacturing is not labor-cost intensive; lower foreign worker wages is offset by other costs.

Appliances

"In 2000, Michigan-based Whirlpool manufactured most of its front-loading washers in Germany. Now the company is in the midst of making a five-year, $1 billion investment in U.S.-based plants, facilities, and equipment. Of the products Whirlpool sells in the U.S., it makes 80 percent in U.S. plants. And it continues to ramp up production of front-loaders in Ohio, where it already makes dryers, dishwashers, freezers, and top-loaders.

“On the one hand, U.S. labor costs are often higher than in other countries,” says Casey Tubman, Whirlpool’s general manager of cleaning. “But when you look at the higher productivity for American workers and consider the fact that it’s very expensive to ship something as big as a refrigerator or washer, we can quickly make up those costs.”

Last year, KitchenAid returned the manufacture of hand mixers from China to the U.S., and GE opened two factories in Kentucky to make hot-water heaters and refrigerators. A spokesman for Sears told us that “through our manufacturing partner, Electrolux, more than 1,200 new American jobs will be created at a plant being built in Memphis.”

There should be plenty of demand if the industry does come back. About a third of respondents to our survey said they’d tried to buy U.S.-made appliances during the past year. And more than half of respondents perceived such appliances as having much or somewhat better quality than those made abroad."

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2013/02/made-in-america/index.htm

[Sunlei]

11. yes, it will be very good. President Obama has worked hard to try to bring back some jobs.

[taught_me_patience]

7. manufacturing jobs are declining around the world

To blame it all on nafta is disingenuous. Meanwhile, manufacturing output in America is at an all time high.

[Recursion]

10. True but that never breaks through the faith-based thinking here (nt)