May 12, 2015
In keeping with the Washington elite’s practice that it is fine to say any nutty thing in the world to push a trade, Nike promised to create 10,000 jobs in the United States if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes. As Post reporter Lydia DePillis notes, this is a dubious promise.
Her piece notes that Nike relies almost exclusively on foreign manufacturers for its products. Furthermore, it continues to go in the direction of more outsourcing as one of its suppliers just announced that it was closing a plant in Maine and replacing it with production in Honduras. Given that new facilities are highly automated, it is unlikely that even if Nike brought some production back to the United States it would result in the creation of 10,000 new jobs.
But the Nike claim largely went unexamined, other than this piece by DePillis. This is part of a pattern in which major media outlets treat any nonsense said in favor of a trade agreement as being true. This is why they don’t challenge people who claim that we get jobs by increasing exports, even if the exports are car parts to an assembly plant in Mexico that replaced a plant located in Ohio. It is also why they repeatedly describe the TPP as “massive” and “huge” based on the size of the economies included in the deal, even though most of the countries in the pact already have trade deals with the United States, meaning that the TPP will have little actual effect on their trade with the U.S. (It may affect domestic regulation in those countries.)
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