War on Want | March 2009

Trading Away Our Jobs

Download the full report:
http://www.waronwant.org/attachments/Trading%20Away%20Our%20Jobs.pdf

War on Want’s latest report, Trading Away Our Jobs: How free trade threatens employment around the world, investigates the impact of free trade agreements on jobs. Examining the empirical evidence for the first time, it shows that the free trade model that continues to dominate world trade has been responsible for the destruction of millions of jobs over the last 30 years.

Despite the evidence, politicians continue to push free trade as the solution to global recession and unemployment: current free trade plans will put millions more in rich and poor countries alike out of work. These same policies have also led to falling wages, poorer conditions and deindustrialisation in many countries. Three in four workers in sub-Saharan Africa now face insecure employment as a result of three decades of neoliberal economics, while unbridled free trade in the 1990s caused unemployment in Latin America to soar from 7.6 million to 18.1 million. Free trade is no answer to the current economic crisis. At a time when unemployment levels are already rising sharply as a result of the global recession, further trade liberalisation will only exacerbate the threat to jobs.