Ahead of the 2020 election, Donald
Trump and administration officials have
claimed the era of offshoring American jobs and factories is “over”, but even through the pandemic US corporations have continued to lay off employees and send their work abroad.
Petitions for trade adjustment assistance (TAA) – a government scheme designed to soften the blow from jobs sent overseas – shows that about 37,000 workers had their positions sent overseas between 15 March and 31 July 2020, , a nearly identical rate to the same timeframe in 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/24/covid-19-workers-dangers-unions
Since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2017 to 31 July 2020,
over 308,000 workers have been certified for trade adjustment assistance benefits. Trump
campaigned on promises to stop offshoring, and workers at companies that have shut down or scaled back operations, including
AT&T,
Carrier in Indiana, Siemens in Iowa and
Nabisco in Illinois, have criticized the lack of support for workers once he took office...
In a recent
policy paper, Owen Herrnstadt, the IAM’s chief of staff to the international president and director of trade and globalization, disputed claims from the Trump administration that current trade policies were bringing back jobs to the US, citing the continued influx of TAA petitions, the lack of progress in reversing job losses abroad, and promised jobs from corporations such as Foxconn in Wisconsin that never panned out.
“We cannot simply turn around offshoring by doing what the current administration has done: tweeting out tariffs and issuing executive orders ‘encouraging’ companies to use domestic sourcing,” Herrnstadt argued.
A
report published in August 2020 by the Economic Policy Institute noted that between 2016 to 2018, the latest year of available data, nearly 1,800 manufacturing factories in the US had disappeared. The report notes coronavirus has further hit manufacturing with the loss of 740,000 jobs this year, and trade deficits that drive offshoring, particularly with China and Mexico, have continued to increase under Trump...
Despite Trump’s claim that the era of offshoring US jobs is ‘over’, 37,000 workers had their positions sent overseas in three months
www.theguardian.com