President Obama and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman have been saying that NAFTA didn’t work out quite as well as planned.
They’ve been saying that the two big multilateral agreements they’re now trying to wrap up will work better, because they apply the lessons learned from NAFTA to ensure that its detriments, i.e., job losses, aren’t repeated.
The problem is that no one knows how many jobs losses NAFTA caused. So, it seemed like a good idea to try to get a reasonable, objective estimate of that.
The only empirical way to do it would be to count the number of American workers who qualified for federal benefits under a program called NAFTA-Trade Adjustment Assistance or NAFTA-TAA. That wouldn’t yield a precise number, but it would at least be in the ballpark.
There’s only one problem: the U.S. Labor Department, which ran the program, has no idea how many people qualified. It doesn’t know how much of the taxpayers’ money – your money if you’re American – it spent on those benefits.
That is what the director of the Labor Department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Office said in a written response to a Freedom of Information Act request for records showing how many displaced workers had been certified as eligible for NAFTA-TAA.
“After an extensive review, we regret to inform you that we are unable identify any records responsive to your request,” wrote Norris Tyler III. Under the FOI Act, “a ‘no records’ response must be provided because the aforementioned records do not exist.”
How can that be? How can a government agency that administered a congressionally-authorized benefits program for unemployed workers have no records of that program’s history and costs?
They knew in 1997, when the Government Accountability Office reported that the Secretary of Labor had determined that 142,884 individuals from 46 states had been found eligible for NAFTA-TAA benefits. But 18 years later, those records have disappeared and no one seems to know how or why. And no one seems to want to talk about it. Requests for an explanation were unrequited.
Congress authorized NAFTA-TAA in 1993, the year before NAFTA took effect. It is separate from the overall TAA program, which dates to 1975, and whose purpose is to assist “workers who have lost or may lose their jobs as a result of foreign trade,” the Labor Department says. It says TAA has “served” more than 2 million workers.
The department says: “The NAFTA-TAA Program offers help to workers whose companies have been directly or indirectly impacted as a result of trade with or a shift in production to Canada or Mexico, known as primary and secondary firms, respectively. Primary firms are those adversely affected by trade with Canada or Mexico, or who shift production to Mexico or Canada. Secondaryfirms are those which supply materials to primary firms and/or assemble or finish products of primary firms. Family farmers and farm workers that do not meet the group eligibility requirement are also considered under the procedures for secondary firms.*
Congress authorized and the taxpayers paid for the NAFTA-TAA program. No one would argue that they have no right to know how many people the program served and how much it cost.
What probably happened is that NAFTA-TAA data were commingled with data from the overall TAA program and Labor Department employees don’t want to be bothered segregating them.
Maybe that’s excusable given that the program expired in 2002. On the other hand, Americans argue about NAFTA the way they argue about the Civil War – with more passion than facts. It would help to inject something factual into an argument that is mostly passion-based.
It’s a shame that we can’t.
* Italics and bold-face are DOL’s.
