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On the northern side of Monrovia, a team of nurses are vaccinating children on the veranda of the AfroMed clinic. Tables with boxes of rubber gloves and vaccine coolers are arranged in the shade out of the intense, tropical sun.

A mother rocks her crying baby, who's just been jabbed with the measles shot. Martina Seyah, who brought her 2-year-old daughter, Irena, to get the shot, says parents in the neighborhood are very worried their kids could get measles or other diseases.

Just as Liberia is getting ready to declare itself Ebola-free, another disease has cropped up. This January a measles outbreak erupted. So far this year, there've been 562 cases; seven were fatal.

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"To have this number in just the first quarter of the year is definitely a huge outbreak," says Dr. Zakari Wambai, head of the World Health Organization's immunization program in Liberia. He says in the eight years he's been in the country, there has never been a measles outbreak anywhere near this scale. Now cases are being reported all across the country.

The eruption of measles, he says, is a direct result of the Ebola outbreak.

That's because when Ebola hit, it caused an almost complete collapse of health care in Liberia, including routine childhood immunization programs. Once clinics did start to reopen, parents didn't want to bring their kids anywhere near health care centers, which had been hotbeds of Ebola transmission.

"Because of Ebola there was the suspension of routine immunization services in many parts of the country," Wambai says. "Also we couldn't conduct the follow-up campaign scheduled for last quarter of 2014."

And it's not just measles that's making a comeback after the collapse of Liberia's vaccination programs.

Whooping cough has again reared its head in two parts of the country and sickened more than 500 children. Liberians had almost forgotten about this disease because of the high immunization coverage. In 2013, the World Health Organization reported that Liberia vaccinated 89 percent of all 1-year-olds against whooping cough.

But that high coverage was in the years after Liberia's brutal civil wars and before the arrival of Ebola.

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The Ebola outbreak killed more than 4,600 Liberians, including 189 health care workers. The unabated spread of the virus forced hospitals and clinics to close, and it undermined Liberians' confidence in what was already a weak public health care system.

Now as Liberia moves on from Ebola, rebuilding the health care system and restoring its immunization programs are two of the government's top priorities. As part of that effort, the country launched a nationwide measles vaccination campaign on Friday. Health officials hope to reach almost 700,000 children in a country of 4 million people.

Liberian officials are hoping to vaccinate 95 percent of children under 5 years old against measles. They tried a similar campaign back in February when the measles outbreak was just gaining steam. But that effort failed, and again Ebola was to blame.

That February immunization drive had coincided with the launch of an experimental Ebola vaccine for adults. Parents confused the two and refused to bring their children to the health clinics.

Officials say they've sent out Red Cross and other volunteers to assure parents that this immunization drive is only about protecting their kids from measles.

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The Nike Corporation says the lower tariffs promised by a proposed Asia-Pacific trade deal would allow it to speed up development of advanced manufacturing, supporting up to 10,000 domestic jobs over the next decade.

The announcement comes as President Obama visits Nike headquarters to promote the trade deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Critics have questioned the Beaverton, Ore. backdrop, noting that Nike currently manufactures virtually all of its shoes and apparel in low-wage countries such as Vietnam.

"Footwear tariff relief would allow Nike to accelerate development of new advanced manufacturing methods and a domestic supply chain to support U.S. based manufacturing," the company said in a statement.

U.S. companies and consumers paid $2.7 billion dollars in tariffs on shoes last year, according to the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, an industry trade group. Of that total, only about $460 million would be subject to relief under the trade deal. China, the number one source of America shoe imports, is not part of the agreement, though it could conceivably join in the future.

The shoe tariff reduction under the Trans-Pacific Partnership would only cover some countries where American shoes are produced. China, the number one producer for the U.S. is not covered by the current TPP proposal. Nike, Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America hide caption

itoggle caption Nike, Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America

The potential tariff relief on shoes from countries that are part of the deal represents a fraction of Nike's profit last year of $2.7 billion, on sales of $28 billion. (A company spokesman declined to say what fraction of total U.S. shoe tariffs are for Nike shoes.)

"U.S. manufacturing would allow Nike to deliver product faster to market, create innovative performance footwear, provide customized solutions for consumers, and advance sustainability goals," the company said in its statement.

"This advanced manufacturing model is expected to lead to the creation of up to 10,000 manufacturing and engineering jobs in addition to thousands of construction jobs and up to 40,000 indirect supply chain and service jobs in the United States over the next decade."

Critics of the trade deal were not impressed. "Just last year alone Nike cut half the number of American manufacturing jobs it now says it would create over a decade if TPP is enacted," said Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "Nike's job creation claim mimics the broken job creation promises that multinational corporations have used to push for past controversial trade pacts, only to turn around and offshore U.S. jobs after the pacts took effect."

Nike employs 26,000 people in the U.S. A million more work in the overseas contract factories that supply the company's products.

In its most recent sustainability report, Nike noted that nearly a third of those factories fall short of its own labor improvement targets, with wages and work hours the biggest complaints. Obama says one goal of the trade deal is to raise labor standards throughout the participating countries.

Look at the oil business and you'll notice it's mostly men. That's a problem for an industry that needs legions of new workers to replace retirees in coming years.

The industry hasn't always treated women fairly, but now it needs them.

The oil business just 30 years ago was a lonely place for the few women who chose to work in it. Rayola Dougher, senior economic adviser at the American Petroleum Institute, says attending industry conferences made that clear.

"I'd look out and there'd just be a sea of blue suits," Dougher says. "It was a little lonely for a while but now I see more and more women."

Amy Myers Jaffe also started her career back then, as a journalist covering the oil industry. Today she's executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis. She says the environment early on wasn't always comfortable for women, even on the white-collar side of the oil business.

"You had these stories that would circulate about hunting trips or fish fries where the industry was in the practice of having prostitutes attend," she says.

As an expert on global energy policy, Jaffe often is invited to speak at oil industry conferences. One that stands out in her memory included a hospitality suite with women at the front door, wearing not much more than bathing suits.

"I remember joking at the time — maybe we should get a suite and hire the Chippendale men," Jaffe says. "And that would make the industry understand what it's like to be a woman executive and have to go to a hospitality suite with these women greeters."

It took a while, but most of the industry got the message, she says — conferences are more professional now. But women are still underrepresented in the oil business.

An American Petroleum Institute study released last year showed women make up only 19 percent of the oil industry's work force. That's compared to 47 percent in the overall U.S. workforce.

"It's certainly something we're very concerned about," says Richard Keil, senior media relations adviser at ExxonMobil. His company hires a lot of engineers and scientists, and in the future, ExxonMobil wants a larger share of them to be women.

The oil giant holds an annual "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day." The company also sends its female engineers and scientists to middle schools as mentors and instructors, "all aimed at getting [female students] interested in the subject and preparing them for taking math and science courses in high school that will help them study engineering in college," Keil says.

The API report on women in the oil business projects the share of woman in white-collar jobs will increase. But on the blue collar side, the report's authors believe the percentage of women will decline even further.

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It's not because women can't do the work. Claire Kerstetter is proof of that.

"I never saw myself being out in the field, getting dirty, swinging a sledgehammer," Kerstetter says.

She studied public relations in college and now she's a technician on fracking jobs in Pennsylvania. Usually she's the only woman on the drill site, but says that hasn't been a problem.

"All the guys that I worked with offered a helping hand when I first started," she says, "but when I rejected it and told them I just wanted to do it for myself, I got their respect really quickly."

Kerstetter landed the job after finishing a three-week training course at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. School President Davie Jane Gilmour says the college teaches other skills valuable in the oil industry, such as welding and diesel engine repair.

Gilmour encourages young women to pursue work in male-dominated fields.

"Yes, you may be a pioneer in some senses," she tells them, "but I have a feeling by the time they graduate in four years there'll be plenty more women in the workforce for them."

Beyond seeing it as an interesting career, Gilmour says the pay can be quite good and there are plenty of companies that want to hire more women.

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The Labor Department's latest report shows employers created 223,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate went down another notch to 5.4 percent.

So, yay!

But study the wage figures in Friday's report — and your "yay" turns to "meh."

Workers got raises of just 0.1 percent in April. Over the past year, wages advanced only 2.2 percent, a pace that amounts to treading water for most families. The average workweek has stalled at 34.5 hours, unchanged from the previous month — and from a year ago.

So workers aren't getting longer hours or fatter raises, even though the private sector has added 12.3 million jobs over 62 straight months, the longest streak on record.

Both President Obama and labor leaders want to end this long period of wage stagnation. But they are locked in a bitter dispute over whether a proposed trade deal would help or hurt workers' wallets.

On Friday, just hours after the jobs data were released, Obama visited the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., to talk up the advantages of completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

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He says that if Congress were to expand trade among the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim nations, it would help the sportswear giant create more high-paying jobs for Americans. "Let's just do it," Obama told the Nike gathering.

Nike says that under the TPP's terms, Americans would pay much less in tariffs on footwear. As a result of those savings, the company would be able to move forward with plans to develop advanced manufacturing facilities in the United States, which in turn would create 10,000 good jobs.

In a phone interview Friday, Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that's exactly what the president wants to see — more high-paying jobs resulting from the opening of new markets and lowering of tariffs.

Moreover, Obama wants the TPP to force Asian nations to raise labor standards, which then would "give U.S. companies less incentive to ship jobs overseas," Furman said.

"There's no doubt that the process of globalization has created a lot of opportunities for American companies, but it also created challenges for American workers," he said. "The TPP is designed precisely to better manage the process of globalization" to help U.S. workers export more and face less wage competition from Asian workers.

Many labor and environmental leaders aren't buying those arguments. They say Nike has long been a leader in outsourcing factory jobs and lacks credibility on employment issues.

"The Nike brand was built by outsourcing manufacturing to sweatshops in Asia," said Murshed Zaheed, deputy political director at CREDO, a group opposed to TPP. "President Obama should listen to his party's base, and stop pushing this titanic job-killing corporate power grab."

While Obama and many Democrats may disagree over the impact of this trade deal, there is little argument that the labor market could still use some help. Economists generally described April's employment growth as "solid" but also noted that March's original count of 126,000 net new jobs added was revised downward to just 85,000.

Doug Handler, the chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight, said the latest report shows "an economy that is now growing at moderate rate [but] not as good as in mid-2014."

The Obama administration wants to strap a booster rocket onto the labor market. It cannot count on getting more economic stimulus from the Republican-controlled Congress, and it's impossible to get more monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve, which already has cut interest rates to extreme lows — and is considering when to raise them.

So that leaves exports as the best tool available to create more jobs, the argument goes.

"If you're opposed to these smart, progressive trade deals, then that means you must be satisfied with the status quo," Obama said at the Nike event. "And the status quo hasn't been working for our workers."

He said the TPP could make the labor market much better and that if it couldn't, "I would not be fighting for it."

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, was not buying his pitch, or Nike's: "Under this unrealistic best-case scenario of an additional 10,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, less than 2 percent of the more than 1 million workers who make Nike's products would be U.S. workers."

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