As I travel across the state, I meet too many Maine workers who are now ex-workers. They’ve watched their jobs and equipment unbolted before their eyes and shipped overseas. More than a million Americans who were working three years ago have lost their jobs – and nearly 15,000 of those were important Maine manufacturing jobs.

Throughout the state, dozens of mills that employed Maine workers and anchored Maine communities for more than a century have closed. Without the leadership of Gov. John Baldacci in Maine and Rep. Michael Michaud in Washington, all of these jobs would have been lost forever.

That’s wrong. The bottom line is that Americans need a president who will fight for American jobs as hard as he fights for his own. The Maine AFL-CIO fights for dislocated workers in the state, including both union and nonunion workers who have lost their jobs. But, we need new leadership in Washington that works with us, not against; leadership that once again favors middle-class workers over rich corporations. John Kerry understands that kind of leadership.

As part of his Jobs First economic plan, John Kerry will end laws that encourage companies to export jobs, at the same time plowing back every dollar we save into new incentives to help companies create and keep jobs in America.

We now have a tax code – supported by President Bush – that does more to reward companies for moving overseas than it does to reward them for creating jobs here in America. John Kerry will fight for the most sweeping international tax law reform in 40 years – a plan to replace tax incentives to take jobs offshore with new incentives for job creation on our own shores.

Today in America, if a company is trying to choose between locating a factory in Maine or Malaysia, our tax code has a feature called “deferral” that provides major tax savings if they locate abroad. So companies are driven to take advantage of legal tax incentives that have been on the books for too long and do not serve the economic interests of our nation.

A company with $10 million in profits in Maine will pay taxes at the standard corporate tax rate; but if that company moves to Malaysia and makes that same $10 million in profits, they can avoid paying U.S. taxes – perhaps forever – as long as they keep the money overseas. They have a special tax incentive to send jobs overseas that may have little or nothing to do with normal market or economic forces.

The reform that John Kerry proposes is based on a simple principle: Money made by America’s businesses overseas should be taxed at the same rate as money made by businesses here at home. This won’t affect American companies that locate production in a foreign country to sell to consumers in that country. But it will apply to those who use those foreign locations to export products back to the United States or to other nations. If a company is torn between creating jobs here or overseas, we now have a tax code that tells you to go overseas. That’s crazy. And if John Kerry is president, it will end.

Job leaders like Gov. Baldacci and Rep. Michaud, like John Kerry, believe it is long past time that we put our jobs first and put tax benefits that discourage jobs in America out of business.

One thing I know to be true – if you give American workers a fair playing field to compete on, there’s no one in the world that the American worker can’t compete against. What we need now is leadership in Washington that will work with us to level that playing field.

Edward F. Gorham is president of the Maine AFL-CIO.