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WASHINGTON — The list of companies reads like a Who's Who of Ohio's onetime manufacturing greats.

Delphi. General Motors. Chrysler. Mr. Coffee. Huffy. LTV Steel.

Each had to cut jobs, at least in part because of U.S. trade policy, and some of those workers have no hope of recovering their lost wages.

Jason Woods, 36, of Chillicothe just found out he'll lose his job at NewPage Corp. in August, the third time he's been laid off in 10 years. "There are not a lot of manufacturing jobs left in our area," he said.

Jon Spears, 37, of Amelia has been unemployed for more than two years after losing his job at Delphi in Dayton.

And Dan Lamb, 46, of Farmersville, is waiting to start a new job at a GM warehousing facility after making brakes at Delphi for nine years. He's thankful he'll have a job, but it is one that will pay him 60 percent less than he earned at Delphi.

"That's a foreclosure waiting to happen," he said.

Trade is emerging as a major issue in the presidential election, and not just in Ohio. Last week, Sen. John McCain highlighted his free-trade position during a three-day campaign swing through Colombia, Mexico, Indianapolis and Pennsylvania.

McCain admits he has some work to do in convincing people in Midwestern industrial states like Ohio that free-trade policies ultimately help the nation's economy. McCain and other free-trade proponents argue that policies that promote trade preserve jobs by opening access to foreign markets.

But to Ohioans like Spears, Woods and Lamb, such policies are just another excuse to trade U.S. jobs for cheaper labor overseas.

The government has long acknowledged that trade abroad can cost jobs at home. Since 1975, more than 1,300 companies have successfully sought Trade Adjustment Assistance for their employees — an acknowledgement by the federal government of jobs lost in part because of U.S. trade policy.

Ohio has been hit hard. It is also one of four states that lost more than 40,000 jobs because of trade policy between November 2002 and September 2007, according to government figures. During that same period, the state lost more than 105,000 manufacturing jobs.

Spears, who lost one of those jobs, is bitter because he feels no one in politics is doing anything to help people like him.

"It seems like nobody cares," he said.

A new era

When politicians heralded the North American Free Trade Agreement's passage in 1994, they promised a new era of booming exports to Mexico. The agreement provided a free trade zone between the United States, Canada and Mexico, and lifted tariffs on a majority of domestically produced goods.

With NAFTA, then-President Bill Clinton boasted in September 1993, businesses will have a tougher time relocating "solely because of low wages or lax environmental rules."

NAFTA became the prototype for later trade agreements — and a political punching bag for those who saw it as a job drain. Free-trade advocates squared off against politicians promoting what they called "fair trade," and in 2006 the so-called "fair-traders" scored most of the victories. In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown's trouncing of incumbent Republican Sen. Mike DeWine is often attributed to Brown's steady attacks on "job-killing trade agreements."

"It is a very tough issue politically," admitted former U.S. Trade Representative and Ohio Congressman Rob Portman, a free-trade Republican who is on the list of McCain's vice-presidential possibilities.

A May 1 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reflects that sentiment: In April 2008, 48 percent of those polled said they considered the impact of free trade agreements on the country "a bad thing," while 35 percent considered it a "good thing." In September 1997, meanwhile, those views were reversed: 47 percent said the agreements were good for the country, while 30 percent considered them bad.

Ohioans too are beginning to view trade policies more skeptically. A poll taken last August by Quinnipiac University found that Ohio voters by a 58 to 32 percent margin favored policies that would make them pay more for imported goods in order to save American jobs. Ohioans also said, by a 53 to 30 percent margin, that the growth of the global economy has mostly hurt their family's financial situation.

Ned Hill, a professor and distinguished scholar of economic development at Cleveland State University, said while the job losses are very real, the blame is misplaced. "A number of companies have said (they lost jobs) because of trade, when in fact it was bad management," he said. "It isn't China's fault GM, Ford and Chrysler couldn't design a car people wanted to buy."