Why Congress Needs to Bring Back Trade Adjustment Assistance

Al King and other United Steelworkers (USW) activists spent much of the past year piecing together support for about 600 union miners in Minnesota laid off by Cleveland-Cliffs.

He and leaders across the union collaborated to secure a 26-week extension of state unemployment benefits. King, the USW Local 6511 president, helped to search for training and part-time employment opportunities to give his coworkers options as the layoffs dragged on.

He also threw his support behind the possible development of a manufacturing plant on the Iron Range with the potential to generate 200 jobs—one more potential alternative—for miners waiting to return to the Hibbing Taconite and Minorca mines.

And while King would do this all again in a heartbeat to lift up fellow union members, it infuriates him that Congress killed a widely respected program four years ago that successfully delivered many of the very services he’s now trying to put into place.

He has every right to be angry. I’m livid, too, and so are hundreds of thousands of workers across numerous industries—farming, glass, mining, steel, and tires, to name a few—who got kicked in the gut when Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) ended for no reason in 2022.

The program’s demise ripped away a lifeline from workers who face job losses because of the adverse effects of global trade. Prime example: the Iron Range miners, who produce the taconite, or iron ore, that’s used to make steel for an auto industry roiled by trade disputes.

“Not having it is nothing short of a nightmare,” King said, noting that miners and workers in many other sectors face periodic threats to their jobs over long careers.

“It blows my mind that we don’t have this safety net,” he added. “It’s a no-brainer.”

King is among the USW activists trying to push Congress into bringing the program back, saying it’s as integral to a manufacturing economy as investment in equipment and maintenance of supply chains.

Those of us in the USW and throughout the labor movement recognized the risks of losing the program four years ago.

We made phone calls, wrote emails, and published articles at the time, demanding that members of Congress come together to save TAA, a decades-old program that more than paid for itself by sustaining families and stabilizing manufacturing communities.

TAA provided job search and case management services to displaced workers. Over the years, it offered retraining and apprenticeships as well as tuition for other educational programs, while also covering books, tuition, mileage, and childcare expenses to ensure workers had all of the resourcesthey needed to take advantage of the career opportunities the program made available to them.

Many workers used TAA to start over in the places they already lived, ensuring stability not only for their families but also for the communities that relied on them.

But if workers wanted or needed to move, the program helped with relocation expenses. It also provided temporary wage support if their new jobs paid less than the ones they lost.

Unions and advocacy groups gathered many stories of workers who credit TAA with carrying them through difficult times and giving them a fresh start.

Better yet, there’s data backing up those stories. Workers who received TAA assistance earned $50,000 more over 10 years than peers without access to the program, according to a 2018 study conducted by a researcher who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and attributed the gains both to “higher incomes and greater labor force participation.”

TAA was one of the few programs built specifically for the working class, said King. So far, its death has left about 200,000 displaced workers to fend for themselves or rely on services that states, unions, or others put in place for them.

It’s all haunting places like the Iron Range.

“A lot of folks are potentially looking at selling their houses and leaving,” King explained. “This is going to result in people having to leave the area.”

Given the incredibly high stakes, we’ll never stop fighting to reestablish TAA.

We got a boost in March when U.S. Representative Linda T. Sánchez introduced legislation that would reestablish the program with stronger benefits than before. Among other improvements, her version would extend eligibility to public sector workers who risk losing their jobs when a local or state government outsources their work to a foreign company.

The new bill already drew a number of co-sponsors, but the reauthorization will face challenges in a dysfunctional Congress with few shared values in international trade.

Despite his busy days trying to meet the day-to-day needs of miners, King jumped right into the effort of reestablishing the program.

“TAA is a hill I’m willing to die on,” he said, explaining the program needs a stable future to meet workers’ long-term needs. “We need to provide this for our kids.”

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute. 

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