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"The mission of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition (AMTAC) is to preserve and create American manufacturing jobs through the establishment of trade policy and other measures necessary for the U.S. manufacturing sector to stabilize and grow."
Employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector provides millions of American jobs, enables a diverse workforce, and sustains communities and families in both urban and rural America. Manufacturing contributes billions of dollars to the nation’s gross domestic product on an annual basis and is vital to the armed forces and overall national security of the United States.
The crisis in American manufacturing is historic and unprecedented. It is demonstrated by the loss of millions of U.S. jobs, major company bankruptcies, and hundreds of plant closures. In addition, the hemorrhage in the U.S. manufacturing sector has a ripple effect throughout the economy due to the fact that an additional one-and-a-half non-manufacturing jobs are lost for every single manufacturing job lost. The culmination of these events prompted the formation of this coalition.
In large part, these job losses have been created by trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO) Uruguay Round, and China’s accession to the WTO where manufacturing jobs often have been used as bargaining chips to settle non-trade issues. These same trade agreements are hollowing out all American manufacturing.
The manufacturing crisis, which has cost the U.S. economy more than 4.4 million manufacturing jobs since January 2001, is cause for alarm. Our national security, as well as our economic security, is at risk.
America’s cumulative trade deficit in excess of $3.6 trillion in manufactured goods since 2001 is unsustainable. These chronic trade deficits have helped to trigger the most severe economic crisis our nation has seen since the Great Depression. Additional consequences of this huge trade deficit include the destabilization of the U.S. industrial base, havoc with the lives of individual Americans and their families and communities, weakening the underlying strength of the dollar, large capital inflows for additional production capacity in low-wage nations, increasing foreign ownership of U.S. assets and companies, and the condoning of pollution, unfair labor and other reprehensible production practices around the globe.
To address these problems, AMTAC supports the following action steps:
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Block trade legislation detrimental to U.S. manufacturing jobs and investment.
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Insist on vigorous enforcement of existing U.S. trade laws. |
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Develop proactive legislative and administrative remedies, including an examination of the value of existing trade laws to U.S. manufacturing.
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Ensure that the interest of the domestic industry and workers are upheld in the U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) and as part of other major trade negotiations including the WTO Doha Round and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).
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Review and promote polices, beyond trade related measures, to benefit domestic industry. |
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