The Informationist

Why We Need More Adjustment Assistance Programs

Matt Yglesias posted a piece about CAFTA. One anti-free trader raised his voice with the one incontrovertible argument favoring protectionism: a personal anecdote. Stalenyc wrote:

Call me naive, but f--k free trade. I’m sick of free trade, and with good reason.

I lost my job, that I held for over 10 years when my factory shut down and went to a border town in Mexico. I spent a month their training my replacements, who made $5 a day to my $13 per hour.

And that is the main chink in the free-trade armor. People that make $5 an hour cannot afford the goods they produce. Instead, American companies outsource these jobs for cheap labor, and the goods come back to the US, where they are purchased for an arguably lower price so that the workers who lost their jobs can afford to buy them.

It’s a never-ending cycle of poverty.

Manufacturing jobs go to China. Wal-Mart buys the cheaper goods. Then those laid off from said manufacturing jobs are forced to shop at and/or work forWal-Mart, whose workers are paid next to nothing, because they have went from a $10 an hour factory job to a $6 an hour job at Wal-Mart.

Of course, the root problem is the lack of organized labor and the lax labor/environmental laws in these other countries. Regardless, the playing field is nowhere near level enough at this time for us to support free-trade.

And before anyone argues for the Trade Adjustment benefits that pay for these displaced workers to get training, I went to community college under that program, but guess what, so did everyone else. That made the situation worse. We ended up with 500 people with Associate’s degrees applying for jobs that previously went to High School grads.

We could also talk about the “grade inflation” that goes along with it, and how the WTO now has a strangle-hold on our trade policies...and on and on.

But in the end, anyone who wants to preach free-trade to me, needs to come visit my mobile home here. Before NAFTA bit me in the ass, I had a 3-bedroom brick house with a basement and a two-car garage.

Allow me to close like I started: F--K free trade.

No one commented--which I considered inexcusable. So I took it upon myself to answer for free traders everywhere:

You’re dead-on right. Advocates of free trade (myself included) have let you down. But it’s not free trade that’s to blame, it’s the way that we approach it. You’re probably right that had we not passed NAFTA when we did, your factory job would have lasted longer--but it wouldn’t have lasted forever. At some point during your working lifetime, possibly by now, the factory would have folded under competitive pressure, and you’d be right where you are now.

The only meaningful solution lies in adjustment assistance programs--and again, you’re dead-on-right that existing programs are wholly inadequate. We need to do more than to help people get Associates Degrees. We need to recognize that in a global information age, education, retraining, and relocation are simply facts of life. We need to completely restructure the way that we approach these tasks; to stop thinking about educating our children and to start thinking about educating our citizens. And you’re right once again when you note the futility of dumping the newly-accrredited into a small, saturated labor market. We need programs to help people learn where in the country their (potentially new) skills are needed, and then help them move there.

If the U.S. is going to succeed in the 21st century, it will need and educated, mobile workforce.

But we free traders aren’t the only ones to blame. Unions deserve a large share of the blame, as well. Most unions remain more focused on preserving jobs than on helping their members. A union representing tens of thousands of workers in an industry in which the U.S. is no longer competitive should work to ensure that its tens of thousands of members get the assistance they need to leave the industry with minimal pain. Instead the unions seem more interested in trying to keep tens of thousands of jobs alive in a dead-end industry. It helps no one at all.

I’m truly sorry that the system--again, a system of which I am a small part--let you down. There’s nothing that I (or anyone else) can post here to make it suck less. The best that we can do is to figure out where the real problem lies and work to fix it. And the real problem here is not with free trade--it’s with the anemic way that we try to help those that it dislocates.

I doubt that anyone will notice this particular exchange.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 06/13 at 09:28 PM in American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies, Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders