U.S. Worker-Aid Plan Is Casualty as Trade Deal Fast-Track Ends - Bloomberg

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President 

Joe Biden’s pledge to  refrain from pursuing new trade deals is leaving a key training and assistance program for workers — who the administration says are at the center of its agenda — without a clear path for renewal.

Biden on July 1 officially lost Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA — the fast-track deal-making ability Congress delegates to a president — after he didn’t ask for its renewal. 

But TPA expiration coincided with the end of enhanced Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program that was renewed along with the fast-track authority six years ago. TAA provides aid for Americans who lose their jobs or whose hours and wages are cut because of competition from imports. An estimated 48,000 workers, primarily in service industries, will lose eligibility for benefits over the next year, according to the Department of Labor.

While the TPA and TAA aren’t legislatively linked, the trade aid typically has been used as a bargaining chip to win support for TPA or for trade deals themselves in the past by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Read More: Britain’s Hopes of a U.S. Trade Deal Hits Biden Reality Check

Biden has strongly endorsed rapid passage of TAA reauthorization through Congress, but will only pursue new trade deals after the country has made investments in American workers and communities, a White House official said.

The administration’s decision to let TPA expire without a renewal request shows the low appetite in Congress for pursuing new trade deals, said Rufus Yerxa, a former senior U.S. trade official.

In the past, “you could pull together a bipartisan group to support the trade agreements,” said Yerxa, who now leads the National Foreign Trade Council. “You kind of tried to minimize the opposition from labor Democrats and others by including TAA, but all of that is ancient history now because none of that coalition works at all.”

—Eric Martin in Washington

Charted Territory

Working and Waiting

Average transit times for ocean freight stayed high in the second quarter

Source: Freightos

*Average port-to-port ocean transit time in days for freight booked on Freightos.com

For cargo traveling across the world’s the oceans in shipping containers, the journeys last a lot longer than they did before the pandemic. The average number of days sailing between ports rose was nearly 29, little changed from 30.1 in the first three months of the year, according to bookings on Freightos.com. In 2019, the average was about 20 days. Container shipping is undergoing one of its most  tumultuous years ever, as shipping rates soar and ports remain congested amid uneven recoveries from the Covid pandemic.

Today’s Must Reads

• Railroad delays | Hundreds of rail cars have been halted by wildfires that damaged tracks in western Canada during the region’s severe heat wave, adding to transportation bottlenecks that have disrupted trade to and from North America.
• Auto correct | Daimler and Jaguar Land Rover became the latest carmakers to warn of crimped sales as a result of the global semiconductor shortage, with the latter flagging deliveries in the second quarter will be 50% worse than initially thought.
• Bon voyage | Egypt is reserving rather special treatment for the Ever Given: The 400-meter-long container ship will be seen off on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by dignitaries, diplomats and company officials from around the world.
• Beijing calling | China’s Premier Li Keqiang called for deeper cooperation and communication with the U.K. to help boost relations between the two nations as political tensions simmer.
• Labor defense | Top Singapore ministers defended the government’s free-trade agreements and openness to foreign professionals amid criticism from political opponents that increased job competition from places like India has made it harder for locals to find work.
• On the grid | Stellantis will convert its Ellesmere Port car factory in the U.K. to make electric vans, ending months of anguish at the site whose future had been threatened by the economic fallout from Brexit.
• Entity list | Hong Kong apparel giant Esquel Group said it is suing the U.S. government for what it called the “erroneous” blacklisting of a subsidiary, saying it had been “falsely implicated” in the use of forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region.

On the Bloomberg Terminal

• Shortages restrain | In the U.S., the ISM services index pulled back 3.9 points in June following a record-high reading in the prior month. The rate of expansion remains strong, but supply and demand imbalances are intensifying just as manufacturing pressures begin to turn the corner, Bloomberg Economics says.
• Tallies blocked | The liquidation, or final computation of duties, of a wide range of imports from China will be paused while thousands of lawsuits contesting Trump-era tariffs on these goods play out, a divided U.S. Court of International Trade said Tuesday, according to a Bloomberg Law report.
• Use the AHOY function to track global commodities trade flows.
• Click HERE for automated stories about supply chains.
• See BNEF for BloombergNEF’s analysis of clean energy, advanced transport, digital industry, innovative materials, and commodities.
• Click VRUS on the terminal for news and data on the coronavirus and here for maps and charts.

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U.S. Worker-Aid Plan Is Casualty as Trade Deal Fast-Track Ends - Bloomberg
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