The U.S. Department of Labor says workers laid off in Utah by a business-services company will qualify for special federal assistance because their jobs were lost to foreign competition. The company, Modus Link Corp., shipped the jobs to an operation in China. The company says the 30 laid-off workers were predominantly from operations in Lindon, Utah, and Raleigh, N.C.

The Labor Department says it will provide the workers with career retraining and other services.

The government also pays up to half of the difference between a worker’s old and new salaries for two years. (Associated Press)

I’ve gotten into numerous arguments over the years about free trade and the havoc that it wreaks on labor in sensitive industries. I think I’ve always admitted that it does, in fact, happen. My usualy remedy for this problem, however, is not to raise tariff or other trade barriers, but seek more creative solutions to harness the net benefits of trade for everyone.

This is a good example of a government program that at least attempts to move in that direction. I don’t know any more details of the program, or actually whether it has proven effective. It would be nice to know, for example, what the “retraining” entails. If skilled folks are being retrained for the low-end service industry, for example, that’s not so good.

Salary assistance sounds like a good idea as well, but once again it would be interesting to know what the numbers have been on this so far. The fear of course is that skilled workers with high salaries are falling down the food chain, as it were, and winding up with dead-end, low skilled positions. Even two years of salary assistance does not solve that problem if these people are not put on a good long-term career path.

Anyway, nice to know someone’s trying.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 7:14 pm and is filed under International Trade, U.S.-China Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.