The African Growth and Opportunity Act has generated many jobs in the clothing manufacturing sector, especially for women. Photo: Jenny Bussey Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Most Americans may have never heard of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, but their closets probably contain at least one article of clothing imported as part of it.

The act — AGOA, by its acronym — was passed by Congress in 2000. It’s a free-trade deal between the U.S. and a number of Sub-Saharan African nations that eliminates quotas and duties for certain goods. It allows African products to compete with those from other regions on a more level playing field on the U.S. market. 87 percent of these imports consist of petroleum and minerals, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s not all, though, as Florizelle Lizer, the assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa explained to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs:

The main focus of our efforts and our capacity-building assistance related to AGOA has always been to promote new nontraditional and value-added exports from Africa like apparel, footwear, processed agricultural products and manufactured goods.

This is where you’ll find AGOA’s selling point for the average Joe or Joanna in one of its member states. It’s created tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and many of these new employees are women. Some of the largest gains are in clothing manufacturing. For a poor, landlocked country like Lesotho, clothing exports tripled and 50,000 new jobs appeared following its entrance into AGOA, according to a report by Lawrence Edwards and Robert Lawrence. It’s also helping to empower women by providing them access to a regular income, comments Zambia News Features.

There’s a catch, though: AGOA says the materials used to make products exported to the U.S. must be manufactured in the exporting country or, at the very least, in another AGOA state. But being able to manufacture fabrics on an industrial scale is a tall order for developing nations that don’t already have that kind of infrastructure. Luckily for them, another piece was added to AGOA a few years after it debuted. It’s called the Third Country Fabric Rule, and it allows African countries to import their fabric from other parts of the world, manufacture the finished product at home, and then export it to the U.S. under AGOA.

The Third Country Rule doesn’t quite sync up with AGOA, and must be renewed more frequently. AGOA itself isn’t up for revision until 2015, while the Third Country Rule is set to expire in 2012. In May, AllAfrica reported that the U.S. had said that "its market would no longer be accepting garments whose raw materials could have been sourced from outside the exporting country." Since then, a U.S. congressman submitted a bill to extend the Rule until 2015, though an article from Forbes argues that recent U.S. actions concerning AGOA constitute a kind of "benign neglect."

Not everyone is in favor of AGOA in its current state, though. Some call it a fig leaf for the oil industry or a cap on the growth of African manufacturing. U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is a supporter, but in a recent speech at the AGOA forum in Zambia she pointed out some of its shortcomings, according to Procurement News. She said African governments need to work on providing greater support to manufacturers — citing the example of an American business that chose to import from Vietnam instead of an AGOA because Vietnamese government subsidies meant that the factory there could churn out products more quickly. Clinton also criticized the fact that countries "export only a handful of the 6,500 products," eligible under AGOA, while "the most common export is still a barrel of oil." Others see the Third Country Rule as actually stunting the growth of local textile industries. It might be cheaper to import from Asia in the short run, but local businesses could suffer the long-term.

But in the minds of many, allowing the rule to lapse — or even threatening to let it do so — makes investors nervous and hurts countries’ long-term prospects. Here’s hoping congressional inaction concerning your clothing’s origin won’t cost an African woman the shirt off her back.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Today, college graduation lacks some of the promise it normally holds but some grads are taking the initiative and making it work. Photo: inorman88 (flickr)

You've probably heard something along the lines of "get an education and you'll make more money," at least once in your life.

And for the most part, it's true. Higher education and university degrees are linked to higher salaries, greater lifetime earnings, and lower unemployment rates. This correlation is corroborated by data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows that individuals who possess a doctoral degree faced an unemployment rate of a mere 2.5 percent in 2009, compared with an unemployment rate of 14.6 percent for those who did not finish high school.

Yet, the current job market is still tough for college graduates, and as a recent USA Today article reports, "the jobless rate for Americans with at least a bachelor's degree rose to 5.1 percent, the highest since 1970 when records were first kept." (This number has since declined. As of January 2011, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor's degree or more is down to 4.2 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Still, employment prospects for many new college graduates are bleak. A press release from the National Association of Colleges and Employers describes the job situation for the class of 2010.

...[only] one-quarter (24.4 percent) of 2010 graduates who applied for a job actually have one waiting for them after graduation. In comparison, just 19.7 percent of 2009 graduates who applied for a job had one at this time last year.

This may be a consequence of older workers holding onto their jobs a little longer, postponing retirement in order to ensure they will have enough to live on after they leave the labor force, a recent The New York Times article asserts.

So what are young workers to do, when there just aren’t jobs opening up for them and the national unemployment rate hovers between 9 and 10 percent?

According to a different The New York Times article, some recent grads are making their own jobs, building businesses from scratch and employing themselves.

These young college graduates are trying something new, making up for their lack of experience with pluck and drive. The New York Times article mentions Scott Gerber, a young entrepreneur who opted to start his own company to "...encourage young people to start their own companies — instead of trying to land a job." His nonprofit is called the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), and provides funding and mentorship to young entrepeneurs.

These desperate times call for creative measures. And who knows, maybe this new generation of entrepreneurs is just what we need to give our economy a push in the right direction.

Find more graphs and charts depicting the consequences of the "Great Recession" on the United States' economy by clicking on the following link. Photo: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Data recently released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics bears discouraging news for the unemployed. In short, the Bureau's findings reveal that the longer an individual remains unemployed, the less employable they become.

The New York Times explains how the likelihood of landing a job diminishes after a lengthy period of unemployment:

… [P]eople out of work fewer than five weeks are more than three times as likely to find a job in the coming month than people who have been out of work for over a year, with a re-employment rate of 30.7 percent versus 8.7 percent, respectively.

Neal Conan from National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation," expands on the issue, reporting that high rates of long-term unemployment are a product of the high level of overall unemployment, which gives employers the luxury of being selective in their hiring process.

For every job open in America, there are five unemployed workers anxious to apply. That means employers can afford to be picky. Some would-be bosses don't want to hire people who have been out of the workplace for too long, perhaps because their skills have gotten rusty or maybe because they assume someone out of work that long is flat-out unemployable.

Historically, the percentage of long-term unemployed (defined as unemployed for 27 weeks or longer) fluctuates, but has remained well under 25 percent of the total unemployed population. By today's estimates, the long-term unemployed make up about 44 percent of unemployed workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' December 2010 Employment Situation Summary.

So what's the consequence of these record levels of long-term employment? The United States' government is rethinking how long someone can be considered unemployed and changing the parameters that define long-term unemployment, claims an article in USA Today. The article reports that the new policy has been introduced to address the rising numbers of long-term unemployed but does not revise or extend unemployment pensions to these individuals.

Citing what it calls "an unprecedented rise" in long-term unemployment, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), beginning Saturday [January 1, 2011], will raise from two years to five years the upper limit on how long someone can be listed as having been jobless... The change will not affect how the unemployed are counted or the unemployment rate is computed nor how long those eligible for unemployment benefits receive them. Analysts call the move a sign of the times."

A sign of the times indeed. These days long-term unemployment presents new challenges and added pressures on our government and welfare system. However, this policy change does not mean we are addressing the needs of the long-term unemployed, rather we are simply taking an interest in observing the phenomenon.

Eventually the job market will recover. Unemployment is often one of the last symptoms to recover following any recession. But thankfully, slow recovery is not no recovery.

Immigrants arriving in the U.S. in the middle of a recession are finding it very difficult to find a job. Photo: [ d i e g o ] (flickr)

I came across the story of Tul Bahadur Tiwari, a Bhutanese refugee from Nepal, on National Radio Project. Tul is looking for work after moving with his family to Oakland, California this year. But unemployment is at 11.7 percent in his county and the competition for decent jobs is tough.

Immigrants like Tul have an added disadvantage because often their years of schooling and even college diplomas aren't recognized in the U.S. Damanta Kharel, another Bhutanese immigrant interviewed by National Radio Project, was a graduate student in Nepal. In Oakland, she needs to take her high school exams all over again, before she can find a better position than her part-time job at a Mexican restaurant.

Despite such challenges, Bhutanese immigrants are considered very competitive because they're highly educated. Most of them, like Tul and Damanta, can already read and write in English when they arrive. And that's a great asset, according Don Clement, a staffer for the International Rescue Commission. He tells the National Radio Project that being literate is crucial for landing a decent job.

These fruit sellers are just one example of the numerous jobs in the informal sector, or "off the books." Photo: S.Raj (flickr)

In developing economies, the "informal sector" is full of babysitters, maids, gypsy cab drivers and gardeners. These workers do everything from selling food to stitching pants to making bracelets to selling wine from roadside stands. They're paid in cash so their income is not reported to the government, and no taxes are paid.

The Wall Street Journal explains that contrary to conventional wisdom, the informal economy could be what's saving developing countries from financial ruin.

Traditionally, the informal sector "is not something to be cheerful about," as Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development puts it. The Journal explains:

Economists have stressed the negative aspects of informal trade for decades. Informal businesses often don't pay taxes, and they routinely lack the capital and expertise to be as productive as big enterprises, leading to less innovation and lower standards of living. Since informal workers lack health benefits and other safeguards, they have to save more for emergencies, resulting in less casual spending that further drags down growth.

In the current financial crisis, the Journal notes, the informal sector may actually be the saving grace of developing economies. With demand for export goods falling, many workers are being laid off from their formal sector jobs in factories and are turning to creative alternatives for income. Without these informal opportunities to make and sell products — at the market, on the roadside, or as street vendors — many would be destitute.

The WSJ article, "The Rise of the Underground," highlights several of these informal workers, including a laid-off factory worker who built her own roadside stand to sell homemade medicinal wine to truckers. She now makes $3 more per day than she did at the factory.