Sigh. Dumb economics again--promoted by a whole lot of good Democrats who just cannot embrace the idea that you cannot fix so-called "free trade" deals by pretending to retrain people for new jobs. It's a false, cruel promise.
At first glance, it looks like a hard fight on behalf of workers:
Forty-one Senate Democrats told President Barack Obama on Monday they agreed with his decision to not send three free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama to Congress until Republicans agree to renew an expanded worker-retraining program...
The program helps retrain workers who have lost their job because of import competition or a factory moving abroad. It was expanded in 2009 to include service industry workers and workers who had lost their jobs because of competition from China and India in addition to U.S. free trade partners.
The 2009 reforms, which expired at the start of the year, also included provisions to make it more affordable for displaced workers to purchase health care.
Last week, a group of 162 Democrats in the House of Representatives urged Obama to insist the expanded TAA program be renewed for five years.
But, truthfully, here is what the worker-retraining programs are: they are trying to buy the silence of workers with a bait-and-switch strategy--concede that we are kissing the job you have now goodbye in return for a promised job somewhere down the road.
The problem is pretty simple: the current jobs are typically decent paying, often-unionized jobs with benefits. The jobs down the road? If they ever materialize, they will be substantially lower-paying, with likely minimal if any benefits, and almost certainly non-union.
This is a surrender strategy dressed up as offense. In the same way that the white flag was raised going all the way back to NAFTA--agreeing to retraining and "side agreements" as a sop for giving in on the bad trade deals--the "expanded" retraining is just Fool's Gold dressed up as hope for employment. It makes me sick.
What Democrats should be fighting to do is killing these deals--dead on arrival--and demanding a new trade strategy that is not based on the search for the lowest wage possible.