Sweet Home Alabama

Jobs are outsourced, that is a fact. Manufacturing jobs sure, but also service jobs.

Like people who read x-rays, like call center customer service operators, like the people that keep your IT servers humming.

A federal program called "Trade Adjustment Assistance", or simply "Trade Act", follows in the footsteps of Nafta. Only it provides real benefits to people who have been dislocated from their life's work (call them dislocated workers) due to their job going offshore.

Yes this was my fate, once upon a time (2001), the widget manufacturing plant where I worked yanked all our production from a nice Oregon site to someplace in China. All about price. I did qualify for Trade Act benefits, which enabled me to go back and "re-train" myself for another profession. Which I did, and here I am, state employee.

The Stimulus Act passed by President Obama in February 2009, the $787 million infusion of money into the U.S. economy touched the Trade Act. Expanded it so service workers whose jobs were offshored were eligible for retraining benefits.

This is real and people need this, many professions are going by the wayside. Hard to know what a sustainable profession is these days. I thought government work was safe and secure but public employees are coming under attack, so I fear there will be less of us one day.

So the expanded Trade Act went through February 12, and then expired - poof! The constant iterations of continuing resolutions to fund the federal government has pulled energy away from trying to expand this program again, so its back to its old regulations. Meaning service workers are not eligible anymore.

Not that the trasition of these jobs to foreign locales has stopped - it hasn't. Your x-rays may be read overnight by a tech in Pakistan. The call center operator helping you diagnose issues on your laptop is probably in India someplace (they are very polite).

And why hasn't this legislation been expanded?? It is tied to a long list of "Generalized System of Preference", hey I just heard Hillary talk about this today! It is a long list of products and what kind of import tariffs we have on them. Did you think we had free trade - think again.

Each and every chemical, raw manufactured good, pharmaceutical input, etc. may have an import tariff (tax) on it. Taxing these things makes U.S. manufactured goods more expensive. I think if I traced every item on the list I would know a lot about the state of U.S. production.

To garner enough votes, 2 Democratic Senators tried to add a sweetener to get a Republican vote from Sen Sessions of Alabama. Apparently in his state a U.S. manufacturer of sleeping bags, Exxel, could not make sleeping bags cheap enough due to foreign imports of sleeping bags. So to get his vote, they carved out an exemption to the import-free sleeping bags from Bangladesh (and impose a 9% import tariff). If Sen Sessions gets his way, the entire list will have enough votes to pass. The 'Omnibus Trade Act'.

So it all comes down to one person, one vote. But not in the typical democratic sense.

p.s. Which version of Home Sweet Alabama do you prefer: Lynyrd Skynard, or Kid Rock?