America’s workers know their jobs are being shipped overseas. They know that this trend is driving down their wages and benefits, while CEOs and corporations are making huge profits. But average workers have no way to actually see how this vast, global corporate system actually works - - they have no way to track this multinational race to the bottom.

Until today, that is. Today, Working America and the AFL-CIO launch the Job Tracker, a brand new tool that, for the first time, puts in the hands of workers information on U.S. businesses that are exporting jobs from their local communities. See it at www.workingamerica.org.

We pored through WARN notices, TAA databases, SEC filings and more to bring to the public a tool that communicates the breadth and depth of America’s job crisis.

Since January 2001, America has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs and over 850,000 professional service and information sector jobs. Over nine-hundred thousand manufacturing jobs were sent overseas between 2000 and 2003.

The numbers tell only part of the real story. Unemployed workers like Wendy Meath, who is with us today, are the rest of the story. Ms. Meath is a machinist who worked for Home Products International in Eagan, Minnesota, for 31 years before she was laid off in December, when the firm shifted 165 jobs to Mexico.

You can’t tell Ms. Meath or any other worker whose job has moved out of the country that exporting America’s jobs is a new way of doing business. You can’t tell her that, at some mysterious time in the future, outsourcing will benefit her. Retraining and re-education are part of the solution, but they certainly aren’t the whole solution, especially with 3.4 million while-collar jobs to be exported by 2015 and over half a million service sector jobs are lost every year.

Our Job Tracker demonstrates that over 200,000 U.S. companies and subsidiaries are exporting jobs or losing jobs to trade.

I typed in the zip code for my hometown of Nemacolin in Pennsylvania - where the population is less than 1000. The Job Tracker produced 13 companies within 100 miles. The Job Tracker reports that the firms exported jobs or lost jobs due to trade.

You can type in any zip code in America and a company will pop up. This jobs crisis is not inevitable. But, unfortunately, the official policies of the current Administration in Washington promote exporting American jobs instead of attacking the problem. And, over the last four years, the problem has gotten far worse.

We can develop and implement policies that encourage and reward the creation of good jobs here in the U.S. We can end overseas tax breaks and eliminate that incentive to move work abroad. Ending this tax break would generate an additional seven to twelve billion dollars a year in tax revenue.

We can rewrite local, state and federal laws to ensure our taxpayer dollars are not subsidizing the destruction of American jobs. We can reform flawed trade rules to hold companies accountable for respecting workers’ rights no matter where they produce.

And, with this new tool, every worker in America will now know what companies in their neighborhoods and which local industries are exporting jobs.

Contact Sarah Massey 202-637-5018