[CTC] Ways & Means will hold China Currency Hearings

[Andrew Gussert]

Another decent article through the Stories Project...

Arthur Stamoulis
Oregon Fair Trade Campaign
(503) 736-9777




http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=127975197917908500


Are workers trading down?
Retraining can’t keep up with flood of jobs lost overseas
BY STEVE LAW
The Portland Tribune, Jul 22, 2010


BRANDON CHOI / TRIBUNE GRAPHIC
The U.S. Labor Department reported that 10,902 Oregon workers lost  
their jobs in the past year due to free-trade. The Oregon Fair Trade  
Campaign says those lost jobs are evidence that unfair trade policies  
are partly to blame for Oregon’s stubbornly high unemployment.

Those who preach the gospel of free trade say it will lift the whole  
world’s economy, from rich nations to poor.

And, they say, if American workers lose jobs to workers overseas or  
cheap imports, they can get retraining – courtesy of the federal Trade  
Act – to learn higher-skilled jobs for the 21st Century.

Forty-year-old Daryl Payne lost a production technician job at Daimler  
Trucks on Swan Island when the German company shifted manufacturing to  
Mexico. Uncle Sam is now paying him to learn how to be a water- 
treatment technician.

Lake Oswego resident Mitch Besser, 48, lost his job as a software  
engineer for a Nevada casino company when it shifted operations to  
Beijing. Now, he hopes the government retraining program will pay him  
to study bioinformatics at Oregon Health & Science University.

Trade Act benefits are a lifeline for displaced workers at a time when  
replacement jobs are scarce.

“The economy is going to be turning around eventually,” says Bob  
Tackett, executive secretary-treasurer of the Northwest Labor Council  
in Portland. “This is a good time to train yourself up.”

But even supporters of the program say it’s not enough to offset the  
jobs being lost as Oregon’s manufacturing and high-tech base is  
dismantled due to free-trade pacts.

“This is just a Band-Aid on a large wound,” Tackett says.

In the past year, the U.S. Labor Department certified 10,902 Oregon  
workers as eligible for retraining and other Trade Adjustment  
Assistance because they lost jobs due to free-trade pacts, according  
to data compiled by the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign. The campaign’s  
director, Arthur Stamoulis, says those lost jobs are evidence that  
unfair trade policies, not just a sour economy, are partly to blame  
for Oregon’s stubbornly high unemployment.

If the sole reason for Oregon’s huge job losses is the recession, says  
Greg Pallesen, vice president of Portland-based Association of Western  
Pulp and Paper Workers, then why is China booming right now?

In some ways, Pallesen says, the Trade Act was designed to mollify  
Congressional and citizen fears that free-trade policies would  
sacrifice too many American jobs. “It sounds terrible, but I almost  
believe this country would have been better off if the Trade Act had  
never passed.”




Benefits expanded
The Trade Act of 1974 was designed to help retrain blue-collar  
manufacturing workers displaced by competition from cheap imports. The  
program was expanded in 2002 – timed with the new North American Free  
Trade Agreement, or NAFTA – to aid workers whose jobs were shipped  
overseas. The program was expanded again last year to include white- 
collar and service workers.

“It’s a great program,” Daryl Payne says. Workers can get extended  
unemployment benefits, health insurance subsidies and two years’  
tuition for retraining if the Oregon Employment Department finds there  
are available jobs in the worker’s chosen new field.

But now, even stalwart Portland-area employers such as Tektronix, the  
granddaddy of the local technology sector, are shipping jobs overseas.  
That raises a troubling question for area workers and young adults  
pondering their future education: Just what is a secure job to shoot  
for these days?

There’ll always be toilets
As Payne notes, even X-rays are being sent to India so lower-paid X- 
ray technicians can interpret them.

But he figures you can’t offshore toilets, and local workers always  
will be needed in the water treatment field. So he enrolled in a two- 
year program at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City to learn a  
new trade.

Payne worked 15 years for Daimler as a production technician and doing  
quality assurance on the truck assembly line. He was laid off in early  
2009, and got temporary work counseling fellow laid-off workers about  
Trade Act benefits.

Of 180 workers laid off in his group, only 85 signed up for any Trade  
Act benefits, Payne says. Of those, at least 40 sought retraining  
benefits, though some left their studies when Daimler called them back  
to their jobs.



TRIBUNE PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER ONSTOTT • Daryl Payne (left) and Carl  
Liesegamg work out a math problem during an Algebra class at Clackamas  
Community College, part of their retrianing for new careers. The two  
former Daimler Trucks employees are among the 10,000 Oregon workers  
who lost their jobs due to offshoring.


Program’s limits
Many displaced workers don’t even bother to come to orientation  
meetings to learn about Trade Act benefits. “They’re mad at the  
world,” says Mark Warne, who helps link workers to the program as a  
work force liaison for the Oregon AFL-CIO labor federation in Portland.

Some workers can’t afford to live on unemployment insurance while  
going back to school, even if the government pays their tuition and 80  
percent of health insurance benefits. That’s not enough to make house  
payments and pay children’s college tuition, especially if their  
spouse isn’t working, Warne says.

“A lot of them are intimidated about going back to school,” especially  
older workers, Pallesen says.

Some Daimler workers were tripped up by federal and health insurance  
paperwork issues, Payne says, and were denied benefits.

And the federal government is sometimes slow to certify that laid-off  
workers lost their jobs due to trade pacts. It took 18 months for  
workers at Weyerhaeuser’s Albany trucking division to qualify for  
benefits, Warne says. By then, many had moved on.

Some companies resist filing for Trade Act benefits for their laid-off  
workers. “A lot of companies don’t want anything to do with it,” says  
Tackett, who previously had Warne’s job. Unions or a minimum of three  
workers at an affected work site can file for benefits, but it takes  
longer without the employer’s cooperation.

Payne figures he’ll make out better than most of his peers. He  
couldn’t handle going to college while he was working full time, but  
now has time to focus on his studies.

He’s noticing that three or four job openings crop up each month in  
his intended new field. Though there are 50 to 80 applicants for each  
job, he’s confident about his prospects.

No job is safe
Mitch Besser, 48, who lives with his wife in Lake Oswego, has a  
master’s degree in software design and engineering, but still was out  
of work for two years. So in 2008, he secured a weekday apartment in  
Corvallis to take a job there with Reno-based International Gaming  
Technology, doing computer networking for slot machines. Besser earned  
$90,000, but knew it was short-lived when the company brought in  
workers from China to be trained on how to do his job.

He was laid off in late-June and the operation was shifted to Beijing,  
where, he notes, casino gambling is illegal.

The typical argument of free-trade boosters, Besser says, is that the  
U.S. can afford to lose lower-skilled jobs overseas and focus on  
higher-skilled work here.

“I think it’s a complete lie,” he says. “Anyone’s job can be moved.”

A 2007 academic paper by Princeton economist Alan Blinder found that  
many jobs requiring college education are the most vulnerable to being  
shipped overseas in future years. Among his list of “highly  
offshorable” jobs are mathematicians, film and video editors,  
economists and authors.

As Besser weighs possible training opportunities, he doesn’t think  
technology jobs are a safe bet any more.

“I have thought about other fields that are less likely to be  
outsourced,” he says. “I have no idea how to avoid that, honestly.”



TRIBUNE PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER ONSTOTT • Mitch Besser waits on hold to  
find out about his unemployment benifit status as his wife Diana  
organizes the home office. Besser worked for a software company that  
moved its operations to Shanghai, laying off most of its Oregon workers.


Living on the edge
Sergio Menor, 48, couldn’t find work for six months after he was laid  
off from Daimler last fall. So he enrolled in a two-year renewable  
energy program at Portland Community College.

The Trade Act helps, Menor says, but it’s still tough paying the  
bills. His wife has work as a medical insurance technician in  
Portland, but they own a home in Clackamas and have two young sons to  
support. His wife cashed in her 401(k), and the couple has run up big  
credit card debts.

“Sometimes we miss our payments for the house, and the utility bills,”  
Menor says.

When he’s done with the two-year program, he thinks the only company  
hiring is Vestas, a Danish wind-energy company with regional  
headquarters in Portland.

Menor immigrated here from the Philippines in 1993 to get a better  
life. Now, it seems, many local jobs are going back to Asia.

Upside of free trade
Portland economist Joe Cortright and others point out that free-trade  
pacts are a boon for local employers competing well internationally,  
including the state’s largest locally based company, Nike, and  
Oregon’s largest private employer, Intel.

Consumers and businesses also enjoy cheaper prices on a host of  
imported goods.

“Oregon is a major exporter, being on the coast and near growing Asian  
markets. We gain from that,” says Nick Beleiciks, state employment  
economist for the Oregon Employment Department. Some of the same  
companies that lost jobs due to free-trade pacts might gain jobs in  
other units, he notes.

However, it’s not clear if Oregon has gained more jobs than it has  
lost due to trade pacts, Beleiciks says. The big fear when the U.S.  
endorsed NAFTA and other free-trade agreements was the loss of  
manufacturing jobs, and that has occurred, he says.

When the Great Recession gripped Oregon in July 2008, the state had  
143,100 manufacturing jobs in durable goods – a category that includes  
trucks, other transportation, computers, computer components, metals,  
electronic instruments and wood products. Two years later, those jobs  
are down to 113,500, a drop of 29,600.

Since last October, 2,979 Oregonians filed to get new Trade Act  
benefits, including 696 from Portland’s tri-county-area, says David  
Allen, Trade Act program analyst for the Oregon Employment Department,  
which administers the benefits.

Usually only about half the Oregon workers displaced by trade policies  
seek some form of Trade Adjustment Assistance, such as extended  
unemployment insurance, Allen says. Among those, roughly 30 percent  
enroll in retraining programs, he estimates. That translates into one  
in seven affected workers.

A 2006 federal study found that most workers who do take retraining  
benefits get lower pay in their new jobs. Oregon workers using Trade  
Act benefits in fiscal year 2007-08 earned the equivalent of $31,000  
average salaries after leaving the program, according to the  
Department of Labor.

Denied benefits
Southeast Portland resident Steve Keller, 44, would love to get those  
training benefits, to become a heating, ventilation and air  
conditioning (HVAC) technician. He lost his job last year at Innovion  
Corp., a Gresham chip plant. But the Labor Department denied a  
petition to rule the layoffs were due to trade policies, Keller says.  
He’s puzzled by that, since workers at the company’s sister plant in  
Arizona did get Trade Act benefits when their plant closed for similar  
reasons.

So now Keller is job hunting like crazy, and can’t afford to get  
retrained. He’s unsure what jobs to pursue, and which ones are safe  
from being sent overseas.

“I think about it every day,” Keller says. “I don’t have a clue.”




Copyright 2010 Pamplin Media Group, 6605 S.E. Lake Road, Portland, OR  
97222 • 503-226-6397
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