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Companies Backing NAFTA Overhaul Outsourced Hundreds Of Thousands Of Jobs

Daniel Marans
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Multinational corporations pressing Congress to adopt an updated version of the North America Free Trade Agreement shed over half a million U.S. jobs for trade-related reasons since NAFTA took effect, according to a new analysis of government data.

The analysis, conducted by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a liberal nonprofit critical of recent trade agreements, found that 182 U.S. companies pushing for “NAFTA 2.0” ― either directly or through groups representing them ― had outsourced 225,527 jobs to countries with cheaper labor since 1994. The companies lost 284,489 more jobs due to heightened competition from cheaper foreign imports or other unspecified trade-related reasons, Public Citizen concluded.

Public Citizen’s research aims to cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s contention that the revised trade agreement he negotiated, officially known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, fixes the flaws in NAFTA that cost American workers jobs.

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