Bill would offer aid to outsourcing victims

WASHINGTON — As part of their campaign to soothe an anxious middle class, congressional Democrats are preparing legislation that would significantly expand federal aid to the most obvious victims of the global economy: workers whose jobs move to other countries or are lost to imports.

Under a Senate bill to be introduced today, computer programmers, call-center staff members and other service-sector workers who make up the vast majority of the nation's workforce would for the first time be eligible for a generous package of income, health and retraining benefits currently reserved for manufacturing workers who lose their jobs to international trade.

Democrats say the legislation would begin to reweave the social safety net for the 21st century, as technological advances permit more industries to move more jobs — even skilled, white-collar work — to take advantage of cheap foreign labor. By providing special compensation to more of globalization's losers and retraining them for stable jobs at home, they say, an expanded program could begin to ease the resentment and insecurity arising from the new economy.

The Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program "was created in the 1960s, but today's workers live in a different world," the bill's chief author, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said in a written statement. "TAA should be flexible enough to respond to workers' needs regardless of what they do or where challenges are coming from."

A similar bill is nearing completion in the House, and Democrats hope to approve the expansion before the program expires Sept. 30. Trade Adjustment Assistance typically gets strong bipartisan support; Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine is co-sponsoring the bill with Baucus.

But this year, rancorous politics have developed around broader trade issues, threatening the proposed expansion and, potentially, the program's survival.

"This is not going to be a slam-dunk," said Howard Rosen, executive director of the nonprofit Trade Adjustment Assistance Coalition.

The program, established as part of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, is the nation's primary source of aid to workers who lose their jobs to foreign competition. Laid-off manufacturing workers must demonstrate to the Labor Department that they lost their jobs because of imports or a decision to shift production to a U.S. trading partner subject to a free-trade agreement.

If their applications are approved, workers can receive two years of benefits on top of state unemployment payments, which typically last six months. The benefits include income support payments, job training, job search and relocation assistance, and a tax credit that covers 65 percent of monthly health-insurance premiums. Workers over 50 who take a new job at lower pay are eligible for wage insurance, which makes up half the difference between their old salary and the new one, up to a maximum of $5,000 a year, for two years.

Last year, the Labor Department approved 1,400 petitions covering about 400,000 workers, according to a recent study by the Government Accountability Office, though fewer than 100,000 workers sought and received benefits.

Baucus' proposal, in addition to extending benefits to service workers, would eliminate the rule that reserves benefits for jobs lost to U.S. trading partners. Help would be available for any worker whose job moves anywhere overseas.

The bill also would streamline the application process for hard-hit industries, allowing the Labor Department to certify workers industrywide.