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WASHINGTON, DC - The American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition (AMTAC) this month has launched a billboard campaign in South Carolina designed to raise public awareness of job losses caused by free trade agreements and U.S. trade policy. |
WASHINGTON, DC - The American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition (AMTAC) this month has launched a billboard campaign in South Carolina designed to raise public awareness of job losses caused by free trade agreements and U.S. trade policy.
AMTAC said it has a significant number of members in South Carolina who have been hard hit by unfair trade agreements.
"Have you lost your job to free trade and offshoring yet? Vote" the billboards ask along roadways in Columbia, Spartanburg, Greenville and Charleston.
"These billboards are an attempt to help the public connect the dots between flawed U.S. trade policy, the loss of high-wage jobs, the overall weakness in the state economy and the increased difficulty in funding critical public services," Auggie Tantillo, AMTAC Washington coordinator.
The coalition said that it believes the most important economic issue facing the United States is the massive job loss caused by a trade policy that encourages U.S. jobs to be moved overseas and that favors the importation and consumption of foreign-made goods over the consumption of U.S.-made goods. This policy is chiefly responsible for the current crisis in the domestic manufacturing sector and the projected $565 billion U.S. trade deficit in 2003, AMTAC said.
Specifically, the free trade agreements signed by the United States, such as the recent Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), are designed to make it easy for large multinational corporations to move production outside the U.S. As a result, this makes it easier for products formerly made in the U.S. to be produced offshore and then gain entry into the country, costing millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs, the group said.
In the past three years, South Carolina has lost 19 percent (63,600) of all manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing employment as a percentage of South Carolina's total work force has fallen from 18 to 15.2 percent.
The calamity striking South Carolina's manufacturing sector has spread pain to other sectors of South Carolina's economy as well, according to AMTAC. The latest data available shows that South Carolina has suffered the highest percentage of job losses, -2.6 percent, of any state in the nation over the past year.
"When the manufacturing sector comes down with the flu, the rest of the economy catches a cold," Tantillo said. "The loss of every manufacturing job creates a negative multiplier effect. That's one reason why government revenues are down and why preliminary projections show that South Carolina is expected to have a $350 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2005."
