Posted on 04/23/2004 1:10:24 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
WASHINGTON - Rural workers from a small community in the southern US state of North Carolina say their county has been devastated by unemployment, blaming NAFTA and other free trade accords for their plight.
Displaced workers from Robeson County, North Carolina, have taken their grievances to Washington where they are seeking financial help from Congress, as President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry trade blows over the economy ahead of November's presidential election.
"There are two Americas that are being shaped as a result of the job loss ... there is a growing division between the economies of urban and rural America," said Mac Legerton, executive director of the Center for Community Action (CCA).
Research by the Lumberton, North Carolina-based center has highlighted that over 713 million dollars in jobs, income and business taxes were lost between 1993-2003 in the county as a result of manufacturing job losses.
Many jobs have been eroded due to free trade accords like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Legerton said in a telephone interview.
"The question we have asked is why weren't those jobs saved?" he asked, saying that Washington had moved to protect the nation's agricultural markets, but not rural businesses.
President Bush flew to North Carolina on April 5 where he announced new changes to the Workforce Training System program to help America's jobless, saying he wanted to double the number of people who finish job retraining programs.
The program, created in 1998, is in part designed to help workers who have been displaced by foreign competition, a major issue in the upcoming November 2 election and in places like Robeson County.
Bush wants to increase the number of people trained from 206,000 to 412,000, according to senior administration officials.
"I don't know if this (program) will come down to Robeson County, I hope it will," Sandra Bailey, 57, a county resident who was laid off by a local mill in May 2001 after 13 years of service, said.
Bailey, who is still without work, travelled to Washington last month with a CCA delegation to attend a congressional forum where unemployed workers told lawmakers about the dire job blight affecting their community.
The CCA is seeking 10 million dollars from the government, and 10 million from the private sector to help ease local job losses.
Legerton said the problem with the Workforce Training System program is that "there's no job to be retrained for."
Bailey had worked at a mill that made fabric for vehicle interiors, but it relocated to Mexico and she believes she lost her job because of accords like NAFTA.
"It (NAFTA) really hurt us in a lot of ways because most of our jobs here in Robeson County have left, and we have no jobs to go to," she said, adding that Mexican workers had been trained in her plant before the mill was relocated south of the border.
A traditional base for textile, clothes and furniture manufacturing, in the three years to 2000, Robeson County lost 41 percent of its manufacturing jobs, according to a CCA study.
The study depicts the county as a window on rural America and says NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) have eroded thousands of jobs across the state.
Under fire from Kerry over his economic policies, the president is working to trim the nation's 5.7% unemployment rate, and chose to deliver his message in a state that has lost 155,000 manufacturing jobs in the past three years.
Senator Kerry has promised that if elected president, he would make the most sweeping reform of international tax law in four decades to halt the flow of US jobs overseas.
His plan would eliminate all tax breaks that encourage companies to move jobs overseas and use the savings to encourage companies to create jobs in the United States.
Although the economy added an unexpected 308,000 jobs in March, companies are still shedding workers ahead of the election.
Some Wall Street economists say the US economy will have to create 3.9 million jobs to return to full employment, taking into account recent lay offs and the expansion of the workforce.
Bailey said Washington lawmakers appeared sympathetic, but no new federal grants have been injected into Robeson County as yet.
"Hopefully, something will come up from our visit to Washington," Bailey added.
(I would gladly pay that tax if it included neutering legislators.)
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