Free trade won’t kill U.S. jobs — robots may

(PHOTO: Vydrin via Shutterstock)

Critics of President Barack Obama’s plan to sign a Trans-Pacific agreement that would create the world’s biggest free trade zone are missing the point: the biggest threat to U.S. jobs won’t come from cheaper imports from Vietnam, Malaysia or Mexico, but from robots.

Congressional opponents of Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) — a bloc of 12 Pacific Rim countries in Asia and the Americas that would include Japan, the world’s third largest economy — say the deal would outsource jobs to cheap-labor Asian countries. Among the biggest critics of the plan is the AFL-CIO, and legislators from Obama’s own Democratic party.

But their fears are at best exaggerated. While some of TTP participants, such as Vietnam and Malaysia, have much lower wages than the United States, workers in other possible TTP member countries, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Japan, by most standards earn higher wages.

More importantly, as a new book called “The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future” says, the big threat to world employment in coming years will come from robots, who will increasingly displace human factory workers, white collar employees and professionals from their current jobs.

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