Budget & Economy | Crime & Gang Violence | Education | Energy & Environment | Equal Opportunity | Ethics & Accountability | Health Care | Immigration | Middle Class | Military & Veterans | National Security & Iraq | Rural | Second Amendment Rights | Seniors | Trade & Jobs | Women

Trade: Making Trade Work for North Carolina

Increasing Our Competitiveness, Restoring Jobs And Reinvigorating Communities

[Download the PDF]
[Download a Side by Side Comparison]

When done right, trade opens up nations to new products, new opportunities, and new ideas. It is one of the ways in which the democratic ideals and values that serve as the foundation of our great nation are transmitted across the world. Trade also encourages healthy competition in our economy, which prevents our businesses from becoming complacent and increases the drive for more efficient and innovative products. Consumers across the country benefit not just from lower prices, but from new ideas and new opportunities.

For too many years, however, trade deals have been written to pull down wages and working conditions in the U.S. and other developed countries, instead of pulling them up in the developing world. As corporate profits and CEO pay have soared, the incomes of ordinary North Carolinians have stagnated. Even in the best case, the pitfalls of trade are too apparent for Americans and for North Carolinians in particular. We need only look at once thriving communities built on the textile and apparel and furniture industries that are being devastated by low-cost competition from China and Mexico and other countries around the world. The benefits of trade are many and are diffused throughout the society at large. The negatives of trade are life-changing and fall calamitously on the communities of North Carolina and others that had depended for so long on quality manufacturing jobs.

It is the job of our government to create opportunities for growth and prosperity for middle class families and not just the well-connected special interests. That means writing trade deals that serve the best interests of the employees on the shop floor as well as the executives in the corner offices. It also means reconciling the benefits and the negatives of trade – to create a framework in which the benefits work for all and in which we do not ask those whose lives have been negatively impacted by trade to bear the burden alone. The Bush Administration and corporate special interests have neglected these tasks over the past eight years. Kay Hagan will work hard to ensure our government creates a fair and accountable trade policy framework that works for all Americans and all North Carolinians.

KEY TRADE POLICY PRINCIPLES

Kay Hagan will work hard to support and create a trade policy framework built on two principal platforms.

• - Our trade policy needs to be not just fair, but accountable to the American people, and must be designed to raise Americans’ living standards, not just American companies’ share prices.
• - To make trade work for America and North Carolina, our businesses and our institutions must create a competitive environment to ensure that no one will be more innovative than America.

ACCOUNTABLE TRADE

Kay Hagan firmly supports the growing consensus around the need for Fair Trade but she wants to go farther than that. She wants to ensure that the government maintains its responsibilities to the American people by creating a trade policy framework in which the spirit of the law is reflected in the letter of the law and in the actions of the government. Kay’s Accountable Trade policy involves four separate components:

Fair Trade That Works For North Carolina, Instead Of For The Special Interests: When we engage in negotiations for free trade agreements with other countries and other institutions, we need to ensure that all parties are working on a level playing field. Businesses in North Carolina and the United States must compete while respecting important labor and environmental regulations that protect our workers and our environment. Our trade agreements need to include enforceable labor and environmental standards to prevent businesses from engaging in a race to the bottom by off-shoring their factories to newly opened markets with little or no environmental and labor protections. American workers and American businesses can compete with anyone, but only if they participate on a level playing field.

Trade Agreement Enforcement To Ensure Terms Are Met: Over the past seven years we have seen a massive explosion in trade and a substantial increase in the number of free trade agreements. When we negotiate these agreements with other countries, we create carefully defined monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that these agreements are worth more than the paper upon which they are written. However, despite this massive explosion in trade, the Bush Administration has completely ignored its monitoring and enforcement responsibilities. The number of enforcement actions brought forward has gone down as trade has gone up and the Administration has devoted only 1/5th of the staff of the U.S. Trade Representative to monitoring and enforcement, while the rest of the staff are focused on negotiating still more bilateral agreements that it has no intention of enforcing. [Brookings Institute, Lael Brainard testimony to Senate Committee on Finance, 5/22/08]

For trade to be truly accountable, honest and fair, the environmental, labor, and intellectual property standards we write into our agreements to give American companies fair access to foreign markets and to protect them against unfair competition must be enforced. Kay Hagan supports giving enforcement authority to the Department of Justice, which has the expertise and mandate to enforce our treaties as well as our laws, by creating a post of Deputy Attorney General for Trade Enforcement, and will focus on delivering to our government the resources it needs to carry out this responsibility.

Trade Adjustment Assistance To Help Workers Hurt By Trade: If government is to pursue a platform of Accountable Trade, it needs to provide aid to those who are bearing the burden of job losses due to trade. Years ago we created the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program, which is tasked with providing assistance to those who have been adversely affected by trade through income support, training, health care assistance, and job search assistance. This program has been invaluable to the United States and especially to North Carolina – where in the past five years more than 70,000 North Carolinian workers have been assisted. But the TAA program is outdated; for example, it only provides benefits for lost manufacturing jobs, though globalization is increasingly driving a variety of service sector jobs overseas as well. Moreover, even the current TAA is in jeopardy, as it is due to expire and Republicans in Congress have refused to reauthorize it. [US Department of Labor, Trade Adjustment Assistance, 2/8/07]

Kay Hagan will fight for North Carolinians by protecting, expanding, and updating the TAA program so that it conforms to the 21st Century economy.

Tax Policy Reform To Prevent Jobs From Being Outsourced: Finally, for truly Accountable Trade, government must assure that the spirit of the law is not being defeated by corporate loopholes. In its current form, our tax policy provides incentives to corporations who move jobs overseas. Kay Hagan will ensure that these loopholes are closed and that businesses are rewarded for keeping jobs in America.

COMPETITIVENESS

To take advantage of trade, it’s not enough to merely have an honest and transparent trade policy. To truly take advantage of the benefits of trade for the American economy, we need to have the most innovative and competitive economy in the world. To ensure our continued competitiveness, Kay Hagan supports expansions for Science and Technology, Renewable Energy, and Education.

Science and Technology: For the past hundred years, America has been the world’s innovation engine and this, more than anything else accounts for the dominant position of our economy. However, we are quickly losing our lead to rivals such as Germany and Japan and the rising nations of China and India. If we want to keep our high technology jobs and create new high quality jobs in the U.S., we need to keep this engine going.

• Expand Research And Development: We should increase government funding for basic research and increase government support for public private partnerships that help move innovations out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. Kay Hagan would make the R&D tax credit permanent, rather
  than block its annual extension as Senate Republicans did earlier this year, and would reverse recent Republican funding cuts to the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, our preeminent scientific research agencies.
• Tax Credits For Working In America: We need to make America an attractive place to innovate, supporting the product development cycle as well as basic R&D. Entrepreneurs often find that the biggest challenge is moving innovation from the laboratory to the marketplace. Kay Hagan would support that process with tax credits that support the manufacture of innovative new products in
  America and the creation of small business incubators that help entrepreneurs overcome the hurdles of getting their products to market.
• Increase Access To Technology, Particularly In Rural America: Economic growth can’t happen in a vacuum. Just as canals and railroads spurred 19th Century growth, and interstates and the internet drove growth in the 20th Century, we need to develop the infrastructure necessary for a 21st Century economy so American businesses will stay in America and foreign businesses will bring their jobs here. Near the top of the list is speeding the nationwide roll-out of high-speed broadband technology – the highway of the 21st Century – to catch up with and overtake countries like South Korea and Finland that are far more wired. Expanding technology in rural areas will have the additional benefit of ensuring that we are able to train a first-class workforce throughout the country and create goodpaying, high quality jobs separate from urban centers.

Renewable Energy: The defining economic challenge of the 21st century will be weaning the global economy off of fossil fuels. While this transition poses challenges, it also carries an enormous opportunity for the country that wins the race to develop new alternative energy technologies. One of the great unspoken benefits of aggressively attacking the climate change challenge now is that we will plant the seeds for a new renewable energy industry. This will bring a multitude of jobs to the regions that support it most – jobs that are difficult to outsource, since someone in China will not be able to install solar panels in North Carolina. Furthermore, they will create products for export that will be in high demand as the rest of the world begins to focus on moving from fossil fuels to renewables. Finally, with the development of carbon caps worldwide, any region that gets its energy from renewable sources will have an instant competitive advantage. Kay Hagan will work to ensure that renewable energy powerhouses – the titans of the 21st Century economy – will be creating their jobs in America, not in China, India, Japan, or Germany.

Education: Education is the cornerstone of America’s and North Carolina’s economies and the foundation upon which our innovation engine rests. Our ability to compete in a global economy depends on how we educate our citizens. Our public schools should give every student the tools they need to learn and succeed in the 21st Century, and our university and community college system needs to be able to retrain workers who have suffered from trade and integrate them into new high-demand jobs. Kay Hagan wants to make sure the government is doing more at all levels of education, from providing a strong foundation by strengthening early education, to increasing access to higher education with student loan assistance and keeping tuition costs under control. Kay would fix No Child Left Behind to emphasize balanced curricula and real-world standards, and to use broader measures of school success and will push for incentives and more competitive salaries to encourage more people to become teachers and stay in the field. And she would simplify and expand college tuition tax credits, and provide grants to keep community college computer labs open at night for free to help workers increase their skills. Only with strong and vibrant education institutions will America remain the most competitive economy in the world.

Back to The Issues