The jobs lost and the jobs gained are not in the same places or open to the same people

The argument

Proponents of this position accept that trade creates work somewhere and argue that this is not an answer to the objection. A net figure is a comparison between two totals, and nobody experiences a total. Proponents argue that what matters for employment is whether the particular people who lost work can obtain the particular work that is created, and that the two rarely coincide in either place or kind. The mechanism is mismatch on two dimensions at once. Geographically, contracting industries are often concentrated in places built around them, where the plant was the reason the town existed, while expanding activities cluster where markets, finance and skilled labour already are. Moving is expensive, housing elsewhere is dearer precisely because it is where the work is, and a worker's assets are usually tied up in a house whose value falls when the local employer closes. In terms of skill, the work created typically requires training the displaced worker does not have and cannot easily acquire late in a career. Proponents add that the consequences are visible in what happens to the places rather than only to the people. When a local employer closes, the businesses that served its workforce lose their customers, the tax base that funded local services shrinks, and the young leave, which removes the demand that might have supported new work. Proponents argue this is a second round of job destruction that no account of reallocation captures, because it is not a transfer of employment from one sector to another but the removal of the conditions under which employment of any kind is sustained locally.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics accept the adjustment costs and deny they establish the conclusion. Mismatch makes the transition painful and slow without making the eventual employment lower, so the argument identifies a case for assistance to displaced workers rather than against trade. They add that the same mismatches follow from technological change and shifting consumer taste, neither of which is usually described as destroying jobs, which suggests the objection is to disruption in general. Others object that protecting the affected places imposes the cost on workers elsewhere who are no better placed to bear it, and does so without the compensating gains.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue the premise changes the question. Whether displaced workers obtain the new work bears on the justice and speed of the adjustment, not on how many jobs exist, so the premise answers a distributional question with a quantitative conclusion. [Rejecting P2] The mismatch is accepted and its implication denied. Costly and slow transitions argue for assistance, retraining and support for affected regions rather than against opening markets, since the alternative preserves some jobs by taxing everyone else through higher prices. [Rejecting P3] Critics note that the local spiral described follows from any large employer closing, whatever the cause, so attributing it to trade singles out one source of a general phenomenon and leaves technological change and shifting demand unexplained.