Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Blog

Day of Action: Tell Congress, Stop Shipping American Jobs Overseas

Today, Tuesday, October 4, is a national day of action to tell Congress to stop the job-killing trade deals with Colombia, Korea and Panama.  

TAKE ACTION:  Call 1-800-718-1008 right now and urge your lawmakers to stop the three unfair trade deals.  You can also send a message to Congress by clicking here. 

What workers actually have experienced from new trade agreements is horrible. They have caused a devastation of our manufacturing sector, more outsourcing of service-sector jobs and a growing trade deficit that leaves us more and more in debt to the rest of the world.

Get the Facts: 

• The Korea agreement is the largest offshoring deal of its kind since NAFTA. If enacted, it likely will displace 159,000 U.S. jobs, mostly in manufacturing. And its glaring loopholes would allow unscrupulous businesses to import illegally labeled goods from China and possibly even from sweatshops in North Korea—potentially without any tariffs at all.

• In Colombia, one trade unionist is murdered almost every week and almost none of the murderers is brought to justice. In 2010, 51 trade unionists were assassinated in Colombia—more than in the rest of the world combined. So far in 2011, another 22 have been killed, despite Colombia’s heralded “Labor Action Plan.” Would we reward a country where 51 CEOs were killed last year?

• The Panama agreement has many of the problems of the other two deals, like deregulating big banks and letting foreign investors bypass U.S. health, safety, labor and environmental laws. Panama is also a tax haven: a place where tax-dodging, money-laundering millionaires and billionaires hide their money. 

Many of our leaders in Washington—both Democrats and Republicans—are siding with corporate lobbyists instead of learning from the experience of hard-working Americans.  They need to hear your voice today!  Call 1-800-718-1008 today!

Working people know the reality of these trade agreements better than corporate lobbyists—and Congress needs to listen. Please call 1-800-718-1008 right now.

56,938 Wisconsin Jobs Lost to China

Bad trade practices with China have cost Americans 2.8 million jobs.  In the last decade, Wisconsin  has lost 56,938 jobs to China, according to a report released by the Alliance for American Manufacturing. 

The report comes as members of Congress consider trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama in the coming weeks.  Working people in Wisconsin and across the country are questioning the benefit of these agreements and calling on lawmakers to pass job-creating policies, not bad trade deals that have been proven to destroy jobs.

Across the country, 2.8 million jobs have been lost because of skewed trade policies with China.  And there is evidence more jobs will disappear if the trade deals currently before Congress are enacted.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, an economic think tank, the pending Korea trade deal will destroy 159,000 jobs. 

 “Working families in Wisconsin know the effects of bad trade deals first-hand:  job loss, destruction of our local economy and big profits for corporate CEOs who have jumped at the chance to outsource jobs in the U.S. when it helps their bottom line,” said Phil Neuenfeldt, President of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.  “Lawmakers in Washington should be focused on real solutions to our jobs crisis, not passing more policies to enrich big corporations, take away Wisconsin jobs and hurt workers in other countries.”

For more information on this report visit: http://americanmanufacturing.org/china-job-loss

Corporations Backing New Trade Deals Outsourced 18,600 Jobs

This is a crosspost from the National AFL-CIO BlogNow by Tula Connell.

Congress will soon consider three so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) between the United States and Korea, Colombia and Panama. Yet because these agreements do not include sufficient protections for workers, passage of these pacts would be a job-killing move at a time when more than 26 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work.

The proposed Korea trade deal would cost an estimated 159,000 U.S. jobs alone,  according to trade experts who have studied the deal, and its loopholes could open the doors for goods made in China or even sweatshops and North Korea, but labeled in South Korea.

Yet, while corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash and not creating jobs, they’re twisting the knife further into the corpse of the U.S. economy with a new ad campaign pushing for passage of these three deals. And guess what? Some of the 32 corporations backing the campaign have shipped a combined 18,600 U.S. jobs overseas since 2001.

A new searchable database at Public Citizen shows the dirty details. In one case, Whirlpool took advantage of a previous such trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and shipped more than 1,000 jobs from its Ft. Smith, Ark., facility to Mexico in 2008. Caterpillar, a major backer of the proposed trade pact with Colombia, laid off 338 workers at its Mapleton, Ill., facility when it shifted its work to Mexico.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says that these three FTAs are similar to NAFTA, which has cost nearly 700,000 jobs and created a $97 billion U.S. trade deficit with Mexico. Calling NAFTA “a miserable failure for working people,” Trumka says:

We need to be creating jobs—not passing agreements that will offshore more jobs and leave more communities behind.

Polls show the American public agrees.

• A September 2010 NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found that the impact of trade and outsourcing is one of the only issues in which Americans of different classes, occupations and political persuasions agree. Eighty-six percent said outsourcing of jobs by U.S. companies to low-wage foreign nations is a top cause of our economic woes – by far the top concern, with deficits and health care costs well behind.
• Nearly 60 percent of Republicans at all educational levels believe offshoring plays a “major role” in current unemployment, according to May 2011 poll by the National Journal.

Note to lawmakers: Opposition to outsourcing is one place where’s there’s bipartisan agreement.