What's next for the USMCA?
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The anxiety of multiple layoffs. For Marketplace, I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer, in for David Boncaccio. Meta announced this week it's laying off hundreds of workers across several divisions, fresh after another round of cuts back in January. If it feels like you're regularly hearing about layoffs in the tech sector, you are not imagining things. The resume site Zeti did a survey of tech layoff announcements and found almost a third of tech companies did at least two rounds of layoffs between 2023 and 2025. Marketplace's Kimberly Adams has more.
Zeddy looked at publicly reported data about more than a thousand tech companies. Here's Zeddy's Jasmine Escalera.
We saw that almost half of all layoffs come from repeat layoff companies, and 70 percent of repeat layoffs are actually happening within 12 months.
It's bad enough for the workers left behind after one round of layoffs, with survivor's guilt and all. But Vicky Salemi with job search site Monster says when you have multiple layoffs… They're thinking, OK, wait a minute, am I next? So there's more anxiety. Usually there's more concern. There's just more more stress in general. And that has consequences for the business as well. Sandra Sucher at Harvard Business School says 70 percent of companies that lay people off see a decline in employee morale in the first year.
And there's a 20 percent decline in productivity, higher rates of product defects and in general, a sort of a concern about taking risks.
Because it's hard to do your best work when you're worried the next round of layoffs is coming for you. In Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams for Marketplace.
The Senate has approved a package funding most of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Transportation Security Administration. There is no funding for ICE or the Border Patrol. The bill now goes to the House for a vote.
Two U.S. senators are calling on the Commerce Department to investigate reports of heavy construction and farm equipment made in Mexico. This comes as a Trump administration review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement is underway. The USMCA accounts for more than $4 billion worth of cross-border trade. It was an economic cornerstone of President Trump's first term, and it is up for renewal. For more on this, we're joined by Lori Wallach. She's director of the Rethink Trade Program at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit research organization. She's been tracking negotiations. Lori, welcome. Thank you. So the USMCA is up for renewal six years after it took effect. Of course, it allowed for duty-free trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
But its future is up in the air, partly because it didn't live up to its promises for the U.S.?
Well, it's a little unclear what will happen next. The agreement, which was, you know, something President Trump called incredible and was his biggest success of trade in his first term, has had outcomes that were basically the opposite of what we were promised. So we have fewer manufacturing jobs overall in the U.S. economy than before the USMCA. We have fewer auto manufacturing jobs. And our trade balance with our partners, Mexico and Canada, is much, much bigger. And so that is... A set of problems that can be fixed in fixing this agreement, but the president has to decide to do that.
So negotiations have started. Can you tell us where the negotiations are at the moment? I think Mexico is farther along than Canada here.
the three countries have started bilateral meetings. Mexico and Canada are not meeting with the U.S. together, but rather U.S.-Canada, U.S.-Mexico. And the meetings with Mexico have gone farther so far. But the really big fixes, the things that are necessary, for instance, the premise of of the USMCA replacing NAFTA was we'd have a high standard, higher wage agreement, and we'd get rid of that trade deficit because workers in Mexico would make more, be able to buy more exports from the US. And so the biggest problem with USMCA remains the direly low wages in Mexico. And that is a scenario that a big renegotiation with some new rules, also to make sure that imports from countries that aren't playing by the rules don't get in, that can fix some of these problems.
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