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U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown
Protecting Ohio
Jobs from Unfair Trade
At forums I’ve held across our state, Ohioans have made clear their
opinions on unfair foreign trade deals. This week I echoed your voices
loud and clear in Washington: the last thing we need is another NAFTA.
Ohioans have felt the painful effects of these bad deals for years.
This month I was in Dayton and met with Jimmy, who worked at Appleton
Paper for 45 years. He was one of 400 workers laid off due to unfair
trade in 2012.
George, from Warren, Ohio, wrote to me about the factory closures that
have affected his whole family—his wife lost his job at GE in Ravenna
when that plant closed; his brother-in-law lost his job at Ohio Lamp in
Warren when that plant closed; and George’s own plant, WCI Steel, has
closed its doors.
Gary in Continental, Ohio wrote about the devastating effects of NAFTA
on his entire community. The number of jobs at his GM Powertrain
Foundry has dwindled from more than 5,000 to just 1,000 today, with
more potential layoffs to come in the next few years. He writes, “NAFTA
wasn’t good for our community and foundry, because our iron casting
business went to Mexico.”
We should not be fast tracking another bad trade deal that will only
fast track more jobs overseas.
That’s why I voted against fast track authority for the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, or TPP. We must also improve the fast track process, which
could be used to pass trade deals that affect more than 60 percent of
the world’s GDP and millions of American jobs.
TPP still doesn’t go far enough to level the playing field for American
companies and American workers. It would even leave the door open for
China to join the deal at a later date without so much as a vote in
Congress. Without strong rules on who can join the TPP, we might as
well be talking about the China Free Trade Agreement.
We have seen what happens when we make trade deals with countries who
don’t follow the same labor, health, and safety rules that we do in
this country: we get a flood of imports, our trade deficit goes up,
wages go down, and factories shutter.
We owe it to Gary and George and Jimmy to take a long, hard look at
this deal, and we owe it to Ohio’s working families to do more than
rubber stamp a trade agreement that will shut down production in
Bucyrus and move it to Beijing. That’s why I’m saying “no” to more bad
trade deals that amount to nothing more than corporate handouts and
worker sellouts.
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