Oregon anti-NAFTA group says trade
causing job losses and other woes
The Oregon Fair Trade Campaign,
a labor-community alliance critical of
NAFTA-style trade agreements, re-
leased a report Oct. 10 on the human
impact of trade-related job losses in
Oregon. The report is the product of
over a year’s worth of interviews with
Oregon workers who lost jobs due at
least in part to foreign trade.
OFTC staffperson Kari Koch, with
help from college students, inter-
viewed over 100 dislocated workers in
communities across the state.
Their stories are the heart of the re-
port, which is available online at
www.citizenstrade.org/orftc.php
Angela Kile was an employee of
J.R. Simplot until the company closed
its Hermiston potato processing plant
and moved the work to Canada, lay-
ing off 790 people in a town of 13,000.
Kile said Simplot was the best job she
ever had. Her job doing quality con-
trol on the graveyard shift paid $12.43
an hour. Bosses and co-workers were
like family, Kile said, and employees
had access to an on-site doctor.
“I became such close friends with a
lot of people there,” Kile said. “And I
watched them cry when they heard the
news.”
The closure tore up co-worker re-
lationships, not just paychecks, Kile
said. She was one of the lucky ones:
Trade Act benefits allow her to study
industrial maintenance mechanics at a
local college, and her husband is the
family breadwinner.
Koch said one of the goals of the
project was to halt the impression of
outsourcing as inevitable, and instead
get people to look at outsourcing as
the result of specific decisions, includ-
ing votes on trade agreements.
Congress has yet to reject a trade
agreement negotiated by the president,
but members aren’t hearing from con-
stituents who’ve been impacted, said
OFTC director Arthur Stamoulis.
OCTOBER 20, 2006
It’s hard to know just how many
jobs have been lost due to trade agree-
ments. Since NAFTA passed in 1993,
the U.S. Department of Labor has cer-
tified 32,000 Oregon workers as eligi-
ble for a special program of retraining
benefits. But in most cases there were
other factors besides trade in those
layoffs. For example, consumers
switching to sugar substitutes may
also have contributed to the closure of
Amalgamated Sugar in Nyssa, Ore-
gon. The Atkins diet fad, turning peo-
ple away from carbohydrates, may
have contributed to the closure of the
J.R. Simplot potato processing plant
in Hermiston. Both were certified as
trade-related closures.
On the other hand, there are other
workers who may have lost jobs due
to trade but who wouldn’t be eligible
for benefits. Benefits go only to com-
panies that themselves relocate or lose
business to foreign trade. Workers at
companies “upstream” or “down-
stream” from those companies aren’t
covered — these could include sup-
pliers, truck drivers, farmworkers and
business consultants.
The Economic Policy Institute,
based in Washington, D.C., takes a
different approach to estimating trade-
related job losses. They look at the av-
erage number of manufacturing jobs
required to produce a million dollars
of goods, and then estimate job-loss
figures by looking at trade flows. In
other words, if U.S. companies are
selling stuff to other countries, that
means U.S. workers are making it; if
U.S. companies are buying stuff from
other countries, U.S. workers aren’t
making that stuff.
These days America is doing way
more buying than selling: The trade
deficit is at an all-time high. Trade sur-
pluses largely disappeared after 1970,
and trade deficits really began to shoot
upward after 1997, setting new
records every year but one since then.
Last year, the U.S. trade deficit was
$716 billion, and this year’s is on track
to surpass that.
Trade with Mexico and Canada,
America’s two partners in NAFTA,
ballooned after the treaty passed, but
U.S. imports grew faster than U.S. ex-
ports. From 1993 to 2004, EPI esti-
mates 941,000 exported-related jobs
added, but 1.9 million import-related
jobs lost, for a net loss of over 1 mil-
lion U.S. jobs to trade with Mexico
and Canada. The figures for Oregon
are 11,740 jobs created by increased
exports, and 25,393 jobs lost to in-
creased imports, for a net loss of
13,653. In Washington, EPI estimated
14,688 jobs created, and 31,203 jobs
lost, for a net loss of 16,515 jobs.
Of course, it’s not obvious that the
trade agreements themselves bear all
the blame for that. Jobs were heading
south to Mexico before NAFTA’s pas-
sage, and jobs are heading to China at
a rapid clip without the U.S. having
signed any NAFTA-style trade agree-
ment with that country. But critics like
OFTC’s Stamoulis say NAFTA-style
trade agreements accelerate the trend
by making it easier and safer for busi-
nesses to conduct foreign trade. And
the treaties do nothing to increase la-
bor standards in U.S. trading partners,
something that might slow the flow of
jobs to lower-wage countries.
The next trade agreement to come
up for a vote in Congress (as early as
Nov. 13) will be one with Peru.
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