Congress is expected to take up consideration of trade deals with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea as early as this month. Ahead of that debate, top executives of 32 major corporations ranging from General Electric to Dow Chemical signed a letter calling on Congress to immediately pass the deals, warning that "U.S. goods, services, and farm exports are losing ground every day" without them.
Using a database of workers who benefited from Trade Adjustment Assistance -- a program that aids workers who lose their jobs due to foreign trade -- the public interest group Public Citizen analyzed the jobs records of these corporations and found that 18 of the 32 outsourced at least 18,600 American jobs to other countries since 2001 thanks to prior free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): |