Thursday, July 18, 2013

Korea trade deal cost 40K good US jobs already

America is losing tens of thousands of good manufacturing jobs to South Korea because of the trade deal that took effect March 15, 2012.

Our friend Rob Scott at the Economic Policy Institute just put out a report demonstrating the deal increased the trade deficit with South Korea by $5.8 billion, reduced U.S. exports by $3.5 billion and cost 40,000 jobs, most of them goods ones in manufacturing.

Before the deal was signed it was hyped as a good thing for American workers. It was supposed to increase exports and create jobs. Scott politely describes those lies as based on "flawed trade models, and on distorted and one-sided interpretations of the findings of those models."

We got the same crap with NAFTA. It was supposed to create 200,000 jobs. It cost 682,900 U.S. jobs by 2010, with job losses in every U.S. state and congressional district.

We'll be hit with more "flawed trade models" as corporations and their stooges the U.S. Chamber of Commerce  lobby for the latest job-killing trade deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA).

Scott isn't a fan of TPP or TAFTA:
FTAs and other trade agreements make it enormously profitable to outsource production to countries such as South Korea and China that use currency manipulation, dumping, and other unfair trade practices to undercut production and wages in the United States. U.S. MNCs (multinational corporations), including Apple, Boeing, Dell, Ford, GE, GM, and Intel have also profited enormously from outsourcing to Mexico, China, and other low-wage trade partners under the protection of FTAs and the WTO. The end result is a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions for most members of these agreements (Inequality.is 2013). The United States should stop negotiating FTAs and trade deals and fix the ones we have.
Read the whole thing here.