With regard to Alan Beattie’s insightful commentary “Trade policy cannot fix America’s inequality problem” (Opinion, FT.com, May 11), we need to add one major issue — education and training.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush, and former vice-president Al Gore, when promoting free trade, overlooked President Teddy Roosevelt’s belief that trade agreements should only increase the living standard of the American worker. Such accords don’t always necessarily do that as statistics have proved.

Instead, decades after the North American Free Trade Agreement and the December 2001 entry of China to the World Trade Organization, we see millions of lost jobs in the US and a multitude of marginalised people in what was an American middle class. Many workers in Europe and Japan have suffered the same fate as tariffs fell.

Education and training for the millions of unemployed in the US after 1995 and 2001, respectively, was never a major national issue of concern.

Tariffs and tougher trading stances today reinforce the US resolve to create a more equitable trading regime. But policymakers should also be concerned about education and skills development in trades and other areas of skilled labour to repair the damage done to our precious workers — our middle class.

Christian B Teeter
Associate Professor, Business Administration,
Mount Saint Mary’s University
Los Angeles, CA, US