Obama's anti-NAFTA rhetoric

Ok, so I've gone out and found a few numbers.

From: Robert Scott, a trade expert at the liberal Economic Policy Institute (cut and paste sentence from the L.A. Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-naftaqa29feb29,1,762577.story)

"The rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2004 has caused the displacement of production that supported 1,015,291 U.S. jobs since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993."
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/ib214

This article was published in July 2005. So, doing a little math, according to NAFTA's most ardent critics, NAFTA has displaced a grand total of 7,050 jobs per month since it's inception. Mind you, the author doesn't say the U.S. has lost 7,050 jobs per month, because he knows that's not true. He says displaced. Why, because, based on our current unemployment rate of 5%, 95% of those who were displaced, found work. I would guess that many of them got a very tidy severence package.

For example, when Ford recently offered a buyout to 54,000 UAW workers (story as of Jan 28, 2008), the UAW workers were offered: "Employees with 30 years of service can retire with full benefits and a cash payment of as much as $70,000, double the cash offer made in 2006 when the company began its latest restructuring effort." http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2008/01/ford_offers_buyouts_to_54000_u.html

Obviously, not everyone who's jobs were displaced by NAFTA were so lucky. However, it is fair to say that due to the nature of shifting jobs from a plant in the U.S. to a plant in either Canada or Mexico, the jobs shifts hardly came as a surprise to plant workers. These plant shifts are hardly instantaneous decisions for companies to make, and unless the respective unions were completely asleep at the switch at the time, there had to be plenty of advance notice to the workers that plant shutdowns were going to occur.

Next, given the weak dollar, at this point in the game, it wouldn't be surprising to actually see a flow of manufacturing jobs shift, back towards the U.S. from Mexico and Canada.