Hathaway. Dexter Shoe. Saucony. IP. It’s hard to account for the many ways Maine has benefited from world trade, but it is depressingly easy to catalog the losses. Behind each of the layoffs are workers and their families who had built lives around jobs in communities that depended on Maine’s traditional industries – making shoes or shirts or two-by-fours. The jobs are going, if not already gone, and the employees face retraining or lesser work or nothing much.

The situation is difficult but far from hopeless and could be helped along by Congress, which has questions of unemployment benefits and world trade to consider this week. Maine’s senators could be influential on both.

The unemployment benefit is health care, and the question is whether Congress will fund a portion of coverage for a limited amount of time for workers who have been laid-off as a result of world trade. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are co-sponsors of the best deal available for workers: the federal government would cover 75 percent of the cost and provide a method so that beneficiaries did not have to pay a large amount of money up front. Health care policies may cost $800 to $1,500 a month for the unemployed, so even the remaining 25 percent may be out of reach for some – and certainly the one-year coverage will be up before many workers find new jobs – but it is better than what opponents are offering, which is nothing.

Senate opponents to the health-care benefit aren’t necessarily trying to make the unemployed suffer, but they know creeping public health care when they see it. The unemployed workers represent one more group the federal government could help get this essential service and one less argument against treating health care as a right of citizenship, which irks opponents. Government intervention against other countries that tax U.S. banana exports is one thing; health care for all Americans goes too far, they seem to believe.

The other issue is whether the health-care benefit, retraining money and other forms of help under the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program would be tied to passage of the Trade Promotion Agreement. TPA is the new name for fast track, in which Congress gives up its right to amend trade agreements, voting only up or down on them. “Fast track” no longer is used because the public generally did not view it favorably, whereas it seems to have fewer problems or is at least less familiar with TPA, which is expected to pass overwhelmingly in the Senate.

Sens. Snowe and Collins are for tying the assistance to TPA, a sensible way to remind free traders that there are costs to saving money on inexpensive labor: Sen. Snowe announced she would back fast track only if it were linked to adjustment assistance: “Trade has consequences,” she said at the time, meaning the costs of trade must be recognized by Congress. Both senators take some risk within the Republican Party for being strong supporters of linking the two, but in their visits to Maine they could not help but see there is little alternative.