“The effects of bad trade deals, we’re standing at a place where that has occurred,” said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley.
Considered the largest trade pact in history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an agreement between the United States, Japan and 10 other Pacific nations.
But 22 years after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, there is a growing unwillingness to ratify new free trade agreements. Although 12 nations signed on to the TPP, the pact has been stalled in Congress since October.
Skepticism of free trade are said to be among the factors that have driven the presidential campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
In the late 1990s, Delphi employed about 15,000 workers in the Dayton area. Today, Delphi has essentially no local workforce.
Dayton resident Barbara Philpot, 58, used to work at what had been the Delphi Harrison Radiator plant off Dryden. She then worked at a smaller Delphi facility on Kettering Boulevard nearby.
She believes she and her co-workers lost their jobs to workers making as little as 65 cents an hour in other countries.
“We knew that our jobs were going overseas because of all the trade agreements that had come about,” said Philpot, who now works for Montgomery County in transportation. “It wasn’t a good feeling to see our work going away.”
But global trade is not a simple issue. Where the workers gathered Tuesday is just a short walk from an expanding DMAX truck engine plant, which is co-owned by GM and a Japanese company, Isuzu.
Matt Mayer, president of Opportunity Ohio and a free markets advocate, says those who oppose free trade may miss the fact that “trade will happen.”
The U.S. can either negotiate trade agreements or be left on the “outside looking in,” he said.
“I understand fully where a former Delphi worker comes from,” Mayer said. “But I also understand that lots of jobs have been created because of opening markets to fairer U.S. goods and services.”
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