DeFazio, Nesbitt take aim at job-destroying trade policy

Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio blasted the Bush Administration for trading away American jobs in a March 11 press conference at a Portland unemployment office.

Called by the Oregon AFL-CIO, the event featured a room full of union members and unemployed workers, and got the attention of more than a dozen TV, radio and print news outlets.

“We’re talking about economic nationalism, and a future for the United States,” DeFazio said. “How are we going to be a great nation any more if we don’t make things? If the goods get infinitely cheaper but nobody’s working, what good does it do us?”

The week before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a nationwide increase of just 21,000 jobs in February, far less than the number of new entrants in the job market.

American corporations are creating jobs, DeFazio suggested, but it’s no secret where — they’re in India.

Theresa Rüf, 34, was one of a pair of workers who spoke alongside DeFazio. Rüf trained to be a medical transcriptionist, but was laid off after the clinic she worked for began sending work to India. She fought back tears as she recalled the experience.

“In August of 2003, we were called in by administration and told that the clinic had decided to send its work to a transcription company in India and we would only be with them for another two to three weeks.”

Rüf said she can no longer find a job doing what she trained to do. Now she works for a lower salary as a receptionist.

“Some years ago, the buzz word was ‘runaway shops,’ describing factories moving offshore,” said Oregon AFL-CIO President Tim Nesbitt. “That was when job exports affected mostly blue-collar manufacturing workers. Now they reach to workers in white collars and lab coats, in computers and medical technology, in manufacturing and services. And the buzz words are ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ ”

January’s $43.1 billion U.S. trade deficit was the largest ever for a single month, just as each year for the last few years the trade deficit has set new records. The U.S. Commerce Department reported that imports were down slightly, but exports were down even more from the previous month.

To finance its trade deficits, the United States must borrow abroad. Economist Robert Scott of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute thinks the recent decline in the value of the dollar is a sign that private foreign lenders are less willing to supply new credit.

“We need a plan to balance trade in five years,” DeFazio added. “We can’t just continue to borrow to pay for what we’re consuming.”

DeFazio called for extending long-term unemployment benefits by tapping the $17 billion unemployment trust fund; an end to using tax dollars to subsidize the overseas movement of U.S. jobs; an end to allowing tax deductions for the cost of wages paid to foreign workers; and filing a complaint against China in the World Trade Organization.

“We’re locked in a trade war,” DeFazio said, “and this Administration is practicing unilateral disarmament.”

President George W. Bush may be feeling the heat, and is increasingly trying to convince the American people that he cares about jobs heading overseas.

“I’m as concerned about outsourcing as the next person,” Bush told a group of New York auto parts workers the same day as the DeFazio press conference. “People are saying, well, we’ll stop jobs from going overseas by making sure we put up walls and barriers between the United States and the rest of the world,” Bush said. “That’s lousy policy.”

Instead, Bush told the auto parts workers, businesses need tax cuts, and workers need retraining.

In Oregon, Nesbitt seemed to anticipate the president’s argument: “The free-market faithful say, ‘Don’t worry; we’ll get better jobs to take their place, if you’re willing to train for them’ ” Nesbitt said. “We call this ‘faith-based economics’ because it sure isn’t based on reality.” The reality, Nesbitt said, is that workers are losing living-wage jobs faster than workers can be retrained for them. “A job is more than a line item on a balance sheet,” he said. “It is the only product that matters in any economy.”

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