Many of us have been following closely the issues of Fast Track (or Trade Promotion Authority (TPA)), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), all being promoted by the administration with a lot of complaints and rancor here at DailyKos.
I don't want to talk about those issues here. Apologies for piling on with the acronyms, but I would like to bring up an issue that often gets less attention in these discussions: Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA).
TAA dates to the Trade Act of 1974, and creates a process whereby workers who believe that they have lost their jobs due to import competition can petition for assistance to adjust, which can take the form of retraining and moving expenses as well as assistance in finding a new job. The program has been re-authorized in various forms over the years. When NAFTA was passed, a special TAA program was created to assist workers dislocated by competition from Mexico.