Rep. Heath Shuler: Trade pacts no friend to workers

Rep. Heath Shuler
Asheville Citizen-Times
October 16, 2011
Last week the U.S. House passed three separate “free trade” agreements with Colombia, Panama and Korea that will send hundreds of thousands of American jobs overseas and accelerate the downfall of our domestic manufacturing industry.
Like NAFTA before them, these so-called “free trade” deals come at the expense of the American worker. The agreements with Colombia, Panama and Korea, crafted in the same mold as NAFTA, include the same dangerous provisions that encourage international corporations to outsource U.S. production and jobs.
At a time when good-paying jobs are already few and far between, this is not the solution America needs or wants from Washington. What we need now is a new direction for trade agreements — one that is balanced and fair and puts American workers ahead of foreign corporations.
We in North Carolina have experienced firsthand the devastating impacts of NAFTA. We have watched as this imbalanced trade deal has eroded our once-thriving manufacturing industry and with it a strong middle class. We have seen our national trade deficit explode by billions of dollars as a result of unfair trade agreements that give foreign countries access to our markets while keeping U.S. products out of theirs.
Since NAFTA was implemented in 1994, our state has lost an astounding 420,000 manufacturing jobs. Economists now predict that more than 8,000 jobs in Western North Carolina will be destroyed under the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement alone.
There will be clear winners and losers in these latest trade agreements. Wealthy corporations will gain new opportunities to produce goods cheaply in foreign countries with abysmal labor and environmental regulations.
But as these trade deals help foreign companies get ahead in the global race to the bottom, American workers already struggling to make ends meet are put at a greater disadvantage. Rural communities, like many of those in WNC that depend on a manufacturing-based economy, will see more factories close and the jobs that are still left shipped overseas.
Rather than give the advantage to corporations that outsource American jobs to foreign countries with the cheapest labor and poorest worker protections, we should be rewarding companies that are committed to keeping and creating jobs in America.
Trade is not the enemy. When written in the best interest of American workers, trade agreements can give the manufacturing sector the tools it needs to stay on top in the global economy.
American workers have already proven they can out-compete any nation in the world. Now we just have to give them the opportunity to do it.