Over 21 years, a series of trade agreements not only have failed to meet their corporate and political backers’ glowing promises of job creation, but instead have contributed to unprecedented and unsustainable trade deficits, the net loss of nearly 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs6 and more than 55,000 factories, the offshoring of higher-wage service sector jobs, flat median wages despite significant productivity gains and the worst U.S. income inequality in the last century. Even for U.S. agriculture, a sector that consistently has been promised gains from trade pacts, U.S. food exports have stagnated while U.S. food imports have surged under NAFTA-style deals.

Given that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pact now under negotiation replicates and expands on the same model, opposition in
Congress and among the public is deep and broad.

The United States has a $178 billion goods trade deficit with its 20 free trade agreement (FTA) partners. The job-displacing U.S. trade deficit with FTA partners has surged 427 percent since the pacts took effect, as imports have ballooned and exports to FTA partners actually have lagged behind exports to the rest of the world. Even eliminating trade in fossil fuels, the United States has a more than $92 billion trade deficit with its
NAFTA partners alone.

In contrast, the United States had a small surplus with Mexico and a $30 billion deficit with Canada before NAFTA. A 2011 study found that the ballooning trade deficit with Mexico alone under NAFTA resulted in the net loss of about 700,000 U.S. jobs, and more than 850,000 specific U.S. jobs have been certified as NAFTA casualties under just one narrow U.S. Department of Labor program called Trade Adjustment
Assistance (TAA).

The U.S. trade deficit with China has grown from $112 billion in 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) with U.S. congressional approval, to $350 billion
today, spurring an estimated 3.2 million U.S. job losses.

U.S. manufacturing workers who lose jobs to trade and find reemployment are typically forced to take pay cuts. Three of every five displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2014 took home smaller paychecks, and one in three lost more than 20 percent, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.