New Analysis of Government Data:
Oregon’s Trade-Related Job Losses on the Rise in Recent Years
State Also Experienced Highest Trade-Related Job Losses in Country from 2017–2019 Measured by Population
Portland, Ore. — Oregon has suffered the highest trade-related job loss per population in the entire nation over the past three years, and, even worse, the numbers of trade-related job losses have been on the rise, according to a new analysis of U.S. Labor Department data conducted by the Trade Justice Education Fund (TJEF).
“The numbers don’t lie. Things aren’t getting better, and we have to stop pretending there isn’t a better way to handle trade to benefit workers and communities,” said TJEF’s Hillary Haden. “Oregon is hemorrhaging more and more jobs to offshoring week after week, with devastating affects on the state’s working families, our communities and our economy.
Trade policy experts from TJEF compiled and reviewed data from the federal government’s Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program, which provides extended unemployment benefits to a subset of workers that the Department of Labor certifies as having lost their jobs to direct offshoring or displacement by imports. The government data reveal:
- Trade-Related Job Loss Is on The Rise in Oregon: Oregon experienced a 114% increase in trade-related job losses over the last three years in comparison to the three years before that, with 11,396 job losses certified under TAA petitions filed between 2017 and 2019 compared to 9,971 between 2014 and 2016. Oregon also experienced a 147% increase in trade-related jobs losses in 2019 compared to 2018.
- Oregon Is the Hardest Hit State in the Country: When measured by population, Oregon experienced the highest trade-related job loss in the entire country from 2017–2019. And despite only being the twenty-seventh largest state by population, Oregon experienced the sixth highest overall trade-related job loss numbers in the country over that period. These rankings are worse than Oregon’s historically worse-than-expected position as the state with the seventeenth most TAA certifications in the country from 1994–2019.
- All Corners of the State Have Been Affected: Cities and towns with more than 100 TAA certifications over the last three years include: Beaverton (777 certified job losses); Bend (101 certified job losses); Coos Bay (128 certified job losses); Dillard (135 certified job losses); Elgin (130 certified job losses); Eugene (1,161 certified job losses); Hillsboro (1,460 certified job losses); Klamath Falls (561 certified job losses); Lake Oswego (369 certified job losses); Milton Freewater (219 certified job losses); Portland (1,779 certified job losses); Roseburg (1,961 certified job losses); Salem (344 certified job losses); Springfield (532 certified job losses); Tualatin (383 certified job losses); West Linn (277 certified job losses); White City (178 certified job losses); and Wilsonville (259 certified job losses).
Additional data from the U.S. Census Bureau also shows that the U.S. trade deficit in goods has been on the rise over the last three years, reaching over $852 billion in 2019.
“The Trade Adjustment Assistance program is fantastic, but there’s no substitute for a stable, consistent job. Offshored jobs mean less income, cut-off benefits and increased stress for the working families directly affected, but the wider community is also often hurt,” said Jon Irvine, State Workforce Liaison for Oregon the AFL-CIO. “When Oregon’s jobs are shipped overseas there’s less money for people to spend at local businesses, less tax revenue for our schools and other public services, and there’s also a very real downward pressure on the wages and benefits of the jobs that are left.”
“Over the last three years, the trade policies have continued to put corporations first instead of working Americans. If we’re going to stop Oregon families from permanent and incurred sudden loss of income and livelihood, and if we are going to stop the bleeding of jobs in Oregon to overseas competition, the administration needs to stop advancing policies that actively encourage outsourcing — such as the 2017 tax bill that gave a better tax rate to companies that offshore production or January’s China trade deal that created new safeguards for companies that move jobs overseas,” said Josh Hall of United Steelworkers District 12.
“We also need to get serious about trade deals that actually enforce labor rights, require wage improvements and include strong environmental standards so that corporations are no longer able to ship jobs around the globe to wherever workers are the most exploited and regulations are the weakest,” said Madelyn Elder of the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign.
The TAA data used for this analysis is particularly reliable as it provides a hard count of actual jobs lost at actual worksites, rather than relying on the economic modeling found in most government, academic and industry group reports about job effects of U.S. trade policy. That said, the TAA certification numbers included here fall far short of the true number of jobs in Oregon lost due to trade — both because the TAA program has never covered all categories of work adversely affected by trade and because worksites where no one actively applies for TAA are not captured in the dataset.
A full copy of the TJEF analysis is online here.
###
Recent TAA Certifications in Oregon
| Company Name | City | Petition Date | Job Losses |
| Dagoba Organic Chocolate | Ashland | 3-Oct-19 | 15 |
| Darex, LLC | Ashland | 24-Feb-20 | 26 |
| Astoria Warehousing | Astoria | 12-Mar-18 | 35 |
| Nike, Inc. | Beaverton | 23-Jan-18 | 733 |
| Harmonic Inc. | Beaverton | 25-Apr-18 | 13 |
| Vtech Communications | Beaverton | 16-May-19 | 12 |
| IBM Cognitive Applications | Beaverton | 20-Sep-19 | 7 |
| PM Industries, Inc. | Beaverton | 27-Apr-17 | 12 |
| Microsemi Corporation | Bend | 15-Nov-17 | 101 |
| Columbia Forest Products | Boardman | 27-Jul-18 | 3 |
| Columbia Forest Products | Boardman | 7-Nov-18 | 13 |
| South Coast Lumber | Brookings | 5-Dec-18 | 21 |
| ADP, LLC | Clackamas | 17-Apr-18 | 37 |
| Stimson Lumber | Clatskanie | 5-Nov-18 | 4 |
| Conduent Commercial Solutions, LLC | Coos Bay | 30-Jun-17 | 14 |
| Georgia-Pacific Wood Products LLC | Coos Bay | 13-May-19 | 104 |
| CH2M Hill Engineers, Inc. | Corvallis | 28-Aug-18 | 33 |
| HP Inc. | Corvallis | 27-Jun-19 | 31 |
| Workers of Insight Global, Inc. | Corvallis | 27-Jun-19 | 3 |
| Gray & Company | Dayton | 5-Jun-19 | 25 |
| Roseburg Forest Products | Dillard | 1-Aug-18 | 45 |
| Roseburg Forest Products | Dillard | 24-Sep-19 | 90 |
| Boise Cascade Company | Elgin | 25-May-18 | 130 |
| Boyd Coffee Company | Eugene | 27-Oct-17 | 4 |
| Murphy Plywood | Eugene | 27-Jul-18 | 3 |
| States Industries | Eugene | 27-Jul-18 | 183 |
| Emberex, Inc. | Eugene | 5-Oct-18 | 20 |
| Seneca Sawmill Company | Eugene | 29-Oct-18 | 91 |
| Imagination International Inc. | Eugene | 26-Apr-19 | 95 |
| Emerging Acquisitions LLC | Eugene | 25-Jun-19 | 18 |
| Heli-Tech, Inc., d/b/a Dart Aerospace | Eugene | 17-Aug-17 | 28 |
| Sykes Enterprises Incorporated | Eugene | 12-Sep-17 | 599 |
| Superior Steel Fabrication | Eugene | 15-Nov-19 | 47 |
| Neurospine Institute, LLC | Eugene | 28-Jan-20 | 3 |
| Arauco North America, Inc. | Eugene | 6-Mar-20 | 70 |
| Stimson Lumber Company | Gaston | 5-Nov-18 | 20 |
| Stimson Lumber Company | Gaston | 25-Jun-19 | 60 |
| Timber Products | Grants Pass | 27-Jul-18 | 52 |
| Hermiston Foods, LLC | Hermiston | 3-Aug-17 | 33 |
| Sumitomo Electric Semiconductor Materials, Inc. | Hillsboro | 1-Jul-19 | 10 |
| International Business Machines (IBM) | Hillsboro | 21-Feb-17 | 29 |
| Delta Products Corporation | Hillsboro | 3-Mar-17 | 7 |
| Fiserv Solutions, LLC | Hillsboro | 24-Mar-17 | 68 |
| SolarWorld Americas Inc. | Hillsboro | 22-May-17 | 654 |
| Oracle America, Inc. | Hillsboro | 4-Aug-17 | 434 |
| Intel Corporation | Hillsboro | 11-Apr-19 | 28 |
| 123 Enterprises, Accenture, etc. | Hillsboro | 11-Apr-19 | 5 |
| Synopsys, Inc. | Hillsboro | 16-Jul-19 | 12 |
| McAfee LLC | Hillsboro | 5-Aug-19 | 185 |
| Ulbrich Solar Technologies, LLC | Hillsboro | 2-Aug-17 | 28 |
| R&M Sea Level Marine LLC | Hood River | 21-Aug-18 | 32 |
| Siletz Trucking Company Corporation | Independence | 23-Jan-20 | 30 |
| Columbia Forest Products | Klamath Falls | 27-Jul-18 | 112 |
| Asurion Services, Inc. | Klamath Falls | 25-Aug-17 | 75 |
| Columbia Plywood Corporation | Klamath Falls | 29-May-19 | 17 |
| TechFive LLC | Klamath Falls | 13-Aug-19 | 357 |
| Vesta Corporation | Lake Oswego | 8-Jul-19 | 90 |
| Autodesk, Inc. | Lake Oswego | 30-Jun-17 | 59 |
| CMG Mortgage DBA CMG Financial | Lake Oswego | 19-Dec-18 | 46 |
| Thomson Reuters (Tax & Accounting) Inc. | Lake Oswego | 21-Dec-18 | 118 |
| Steelhead Manufacturing | Lake Oswego | 2-Apr-19 | 56 |
| Timber Products | Medford | 27-Jul-18 | 66 |
| Providence Health & Services-Washington | Medford | 24-Jun-19 | 4 |
| Providence Health & Services-Washington | Medford | 17-Oct-19 | 1 |
| Sykes Enterprises Incorporated | Milton Freewater | 12-Sep-17 | 219 |
Source: “Petitions and Determination Data,” U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Office of Trade Adjustment Assistance (OTAA). https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/tradeact/data/petitions-determinations
TRADE JUSTICE EDUCATION FUND 