Posted on 07/23/2010 3:37:45 PM PDT by ex-Texan
Retraining can’t keep up with flood of jobs lost overseas?
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. 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.”
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.”
Ok, fine, underemployed. How’s that working out? Great? Must be since we’ve been doing this free trade stuff for awhile now and reaping the benefits.
I don’t see how advocating higher taxes for myself will result in higher wages for myself, but I’m not a protectionist.
. IMHO It can't be done in that manner, although that has been a union goal for some time. The LA? Longshoremen shut down all the west coast ports over exactly that issue. The government attempt would be ridiculous.
The only thing I could think of is to tax the hell out technology to slow it down, making human labor more attractive...however, that just makes our exports more expensive and imports more competitive. That couldn't work unless our trading partners agreed to the same tax. Fat chance. I've been pondering it since my father and I spoke.
You’re right; those jobs won’t be coming back. Re-training won’t help in the long run; as soon as a set of skills costs too much here, you can bet your @ss that companies will find ways to either 1) bring foreigners in to do it, or 2) move the jobs overseas. The saddest thing is that if the recipient of those jobs is ever in danger of collapse, a lot of American dollars and lives will be spent propping it up. If India was taken over by an Asian Adolf Hitler and the Indian people overthrew him, the tech industry and our politicians would devote themselves to restoring him; they’re in a position where they have no other choice.
“...some sort of serious issues coming up...”
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You betcha.
Why are they keeping H1B’s going now? Only thing I can think of is maybe some twisted idea that it at least keeps the work here instead of outright going to India.
Medical Insurance Technician Certificate: Program Summary
By enrolling in a Medical Insurance Technician Certificate program, students will become familiar with the basics of medical coding, medical terminology, and the process of claims management. Though a critical part of the healthcare industry, medical insurance technicians have little direct contact with patients.
Coursework
Some of the courses that may be found offered within a Medical Insurance Technician Certificate program include:
* Anatomy
* General Coding: ICD-9 and CPT
* Computer Science/General Computer Applications
* Medical Terminology
* Physiology
* Statistics
Skills Acquired
Medical insurance technicians or medical billing technicians need to have accurate math and analytical skills with the ability to pay great attention to detail. Medical insurance technicians can also serve as verifiers of insurance claims, collectors, and payment schedulers, so it is important to keep up on current trends and changes in the industry as well as take advantage of additional learning and training opportunities.
Job Opportunities
Graduates of a Medical Insurance Technician Certificate program can be found working in some of the following facilities:
* Hospitals
* Nursing Homes
* Clinics and Physician Offices
Salary Information
As posted in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, www.bls.gov, medical insurance technicians earned an average salary of $25,590 in 2004 with the highest salaries coming from those who were employed in general medical and surgical hospitals. The highest 10 percent of these workers earned over $41,760.
Career Outlook
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, the career outlook for medical insurance technicians is good with employment expected to increase over the next decade much faster than average. MITs with an associate’s degree and a strong medical coding background will be particularly in high demand.
Free Traitors, if the (communist made) shoe fits....
National security is a valid consideration. Whining that Uncle Stan lost his job at the urinal-cake factory is not.
Pablum.
There already be dragons.
About 1.3 billion worth. “Free trade” is leading to the collapse of America.
That fact, is far more important at this point, than your ever-more discredited “free trade” theories.
Commence the trade war.
“That’s right, send them all to the Gulag . . . eh, comrade?”
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I’d vote for a firing squad.
Offer the traitors a blindfold.
Leave the “Made in China” tag on it.
A lot of Freepers have lost jobs and had to train a foreign national to do their job as a condition to qualify for severance pay. You should tone it done.
If the choice is between keeping manufacturing jobs in the US with union employees, government environmental restrictions, and going out of business,
or moving manufacturing jobs abroad so you continue to employee American management, office workers, sales representatives, truck drivers, and give payments to your retiree American stock holders, option B is a bit better.
And that is entirely correct. You seem to be forgetting that government and unions drove those jobs overseas...businesses would have been thrilled to keep them in the US if it were economically viable. So the choice is, go out of business and no one has a job, or outsource some work and some have a job. You seem to think no one having a job is a better option...I personally disagree.
Name one.
Thank you, Mr. Smoot. How well did that work out for you last time, by the way?
You really should tone it down.
You alienate more people than you convince.
Because frankly, you are against Americans.
Your an idiot. Nobody posts their real name here, that would be crazy.
Ok, fair enough. A lot of FReepers owe their jobs to insourcing, and work with all sorts of people holding all sorts of visas. See how that works?
What gibberish are you talking about?
Back then, we were the world’s exporter. We had excess factory capacity, and a budget surplus.
A trade war then, hurt us because we were the ones benefiting most from the status quo.
That sure as heck, is not longer the case.
Commence the trade war.
Baloney.
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