BEAVERTON, Ore. — When President Obama promotes trade, he likes to say that 95 percent of the world’s markets are outside the nation’s borders – a potential goldmine for U.S.-made products. But Nike, where Obama made a pitch Friday, wants easier access to the U.S. market for the products it makes overseas.

Obama’s appearance at the headquarters of the giant athletic-wear company illustrates the competing, sometimes contradictory goals of trade and how one industry, footwear makers in particular, can encapsulate the debate that is churning around Obama’s efforts to negotiate a Trans-Pacific agreement that would open up commerce among the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries.

“I know a lot of folks are skeptical about trade,” Obama acknowledged. “Past trade deals didn’t always live up to the hype. Labor and environmental protections weren’t always strong enough.”

He said this agreement is in America’s best interest. “Just do it,” Obama said, echoing Nike’s slogan.

Nike makes most of its shoes overseas. Of Nike’s slightly more than 1 million factory contract workers, more than 9 of 10 are in Asia.

The U.S. has tariffs on footwear imports that average about 10 percent.

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Reducing tariffs in the U.S. and in other countries that are part of the Trans-Pacific deal, Nike says, would allow it to manufacture more shoes in the U.S. It announced Friday that if the Trans-Pacific deal is approved, Nike and its U.S. manufacturing partners would create up to 10,000 jobs over 10 years in the United States. Nike said they would be manufacturing and engineering jobs.

Citing Nike’s announcement, Obama said that “far more Nike products would be made in the USA. That means thousands of new jobs in manufacturing and engineering and designs in Nike facilities across the country, and potentially tens of thousands of new jobs along Nike’s supply chain here at home. That’s what trade can do.”

Labor unions are skeptical of such talk.

“We have heard similar promises from companies before, and very few have panned out,” AFL-CIO spokesman Eric Hauser said in a statement.

The pitch at Nike varied from the more typical White House argument – the assurance that jobs will be created in the U.S. when lowering tariffs overseas opens those markets to U.S. producers.

But the push to lower shoe tariffs also illustrates how protective policies have defenders in the U.S. New Balance, which makes shoes in New England, has argued that removing all footwear tariffs would hurt its business by allowing in cheaper imports.


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