Certifying Workers for Adjustment Assistance--The First Year Under the Trade Act

Although many workers have benefited from the adjustment assistance program, which provides various forms of assistance to workers who are adversely affected by changes in the patterns of international trade, several problems need to be corrected.

These problems include unawareness by most nonunion workers of the program; nonspecific criteria and guidelines for evaluating workers' petitions for assistance; different interpretations of the law, which caused inconsistency; and delays in processing applications. Possible inconsistencies in the way Labor interpreted definitions of products and evaluated supporting evidence related to worker petitions included interpretations which fluctuated between broad and narrow, particularly with regard to product definition; determinations that varied, particularly with regard to the time periods used to determine what data were relevant in measuring production declines and import increases; and methods that did not consistently determine the link between increased imports and declines in production.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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