LEWISTON – Madeleine Cloutier spent 30 years working for local shoe shops and has nothing to show for it.

She was making boots for Hallowell Shoes in the old Pepperell Mill in 1985 when she was told the company was closing, a victim of foreign competition.

“They promised us $100 for every year there plus severance pay and to keep our insurance,” said Cloutier, 59. “But it did not happen.”

Three days later, she was hired at Custom Stitchers, where she worked for another six years before that shoe shop closed for the same reason.

“It was the same thing … we got nothing,” she said.

Today she lives on a government disability check, still angry that she and other workers were treated so shabbily by their employers. It’s what prompted her to speak before a group of about 45 people who gathered Tuesday night to talk about the impact of global trade on jobs here in Maine.

Part political campaign, part union rally, the meeting in the hall of Local 567 of the IBEW was sponsored by the local electricians union and the political action group Don’t Outsource Maine. A flier listed every company in Maine that has applied for federal training help because of workers who were laid off due to foreign competition; since 2000, 12,547 workers have sought that assistance.

The electricians’ union has a personal stake in stemming the loss of jobs. Don Berry, the training director and business agent for Local 567, said this is the first time he can recall not being able to find work anywhere for a union electrician because there’s been such a pall over the construction industry.

“We’re not building new plants,” he said, noting that National Semiconductor just built a new plant – but in China. In places like Detroit, there are about 10,000 unemployed or underemployed union electricians. In Maine, Berry said he sees construction off about 50 percent, leaving more than 100 of his local union electricians without work.

Tim Costello hears workers’ fears about global competition all the time. What’s interesting is that he hears it from workers in Denmark and India.

An organizer for the North American Alliance for Fair Employment, Costello travels the world and throughout the U.S. trying to persuade people to get involved in workers’ right.

“Corporations are looking for cheap labor,” he said. “We have a global hiring hall now. Corporations are just drawing wherever they can find the labor.”

That means union workers in Mexico are seeing their jobs go to China and workers in India worry that their jobs will go offshore as well.

The solution is for people everywhere to stand together to work for trade agreements that protect workers’ rights as well as sound environmental policies and public health concerns.

“This is the basis for global cooperation,” he said. “It’s not just a global economy in the interests of corporations, but in our interests as well.”

To that end, the speakers urged people to vote against President Bush in November. A supporter of free trade agreements such as CAFTA – the Central American version of NAFTA that is expected to come before Congress in November – Bush and his trade policies are regarded as anti-worker and anti-environment.

Cloutier knows what she’s going to do. At the meeting’s end, she was busily filling out postcards to send to Maine’s U.S. senators, asking them to oppose CAFTA.

“People just need to get together and tell the government what to do sometimes,” she said.