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U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown
Standing Up for
Workers Hit by Unfair Trade Deals
Trade agreements have wreaked havoc on Ohio’s economy over the past
several decades, undermining Ohio’s manufacturing sector and making it
easier for corporations to ship our jobs overseas. When Congress
considered NAFTA, CAFTA, and every other free trade agreement, we were
promised that they would create tens of thousands of jobs.
But those jobs never materialized, and it’s American workers who have
paid the price.
That’s why the Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA, program is so
important. TAA ensures that workers who lose their jobs and financial
security as a result of globalization have an opportunity to transition
to new jobs in emerging sectors of the economy. TAA can’t correct all
of the consequences of our misguided trade policy, but it can help
retrain trade-affected workers for new jobs.
But unless Congress acts now, the TAA program will expire in September,
leaving too many Ohioans who have lost their jobs due to foreign trade
without much-needed job retraining assistance. That’s why this week I
introduced the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act to extend and expand TAA.
Between 2009 and 2014 TAA provided job retraining assistance to more
than 20,000 Ohio workers. But the current program also leaves too many
workers behind. Ohioans are losing jobs to countries like China, with
which the U.S. doesn’t have a free trade agreement, and service sector
workers are left out of TAA.
My bill will change that, and expand eligibility to reflect the
realities of our 21st century global economy.
We need to put an end to short-term fixes and pass a long-term
extension of TAA to give Ohio families security and support.
This is particularly important as Congress moves to consider even more
trade deals. Instead of pursuing a trade agenda that leaves the middle
class behind, we should think about the working families who’ve already
felt the brunt of bad trade agreements. We need to ensure that they
have robust assistance necessary to compete in a global economy.
Our workers are the most productive and competitive in the world, and
it is in our own economic interest to retrain workers who have been
laid off because of trade.
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