The TPP: More Job Offshoring and Lower Wages

Fast Tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would make it easier for corporations to offshore U.S. jobs and push down our wages by forcing Americans to compete with workers in Vietnam who make less than 60 cents an hour and in Malaysia, where forced labor is widely used.

By Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch

The TPP: More Job Offshoring and Lower Wages

• The TPP expands on the incentives to offshore American job that were included in past job-killing pacts like NAFTA. The TPP’s Investment Chapter provides special benefits to firms that offshore American jobs and eliminates many of the usual risks that make firms think twice about moving to low-wage countries, such as TPP member Vietnam.
• The TPP would gut Buy American policies that recycle U.S. tax dollars back into our economy to create U.S. jobs. The TPP would require us to waive Buy American procurement preferences so that any company operating in a TPP country, including all of the Chinese firms in Vietnam, would have to get equal access to U.S. government contracts. That means offshoring our tax dollars to create jobs abroad. 
• Even the best labor rights provisions would not outweigh those terms. But the administration demanded for the TPP only the same failed terms President Bush used for his infamous U.S.-Colombia trade agreement.