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WINSTON-SALEM — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton used a three-city tour through North Carolina on Thursday to highlight her plans for boosting the prospects of workers hurt by economic downturns and layoffs.

The presidential candidate also matched calls by her rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, to rework trade deals and make it less attractive for companies to lay off American workers in favor of opening factories overseas.

"I'm going to enforce trade agreements. I'm going to renegotiate them where necessary. I'm going to have a trade prosecutor so that when other countries violate trade rules, they're going to be held accountable," Clinton said.

Of the tax code, she said, "We're going to take out every single benefit that goes to a business that exports a job from North Carolina."

Clinton made stops in Wake County and Fayetteville before speaking at Forsyth Technical Community College.

On Wednesday, Obama laid out his own concerns about the economy and trade deals during a town hall meeting in Greensboro. After that appearance, Obama claimed to be better poised to renegotiate the trade deals first struck by the administration of former President Bill Clinton.

In her Triangle appearance Thursday morning, Hillary Clinton pushed back against that notion.

"I'm the only candidate with a plan to fix NAFTA," Clinton said, referring to the much-criticized North American Free Trade Agreement. "It's time that somebody said to the rest of the world, 'We're happy to trade with you, but we're not going to be taken advantage of.'"

Trade was a hotly contested topic earlier this year when Clinton and Obama campaigned in Midwestern primaries.

Job losses there, most notably in the automobile industry, have made trade deals a key issue for voters.

Losses in the furniture and textile industries have affected North Carolina and have made trade a relevant topic to voters here, although state officials say they have managed to offset some of the damage by attracting jobs in other industries.

And there are economists who argue that free trade has been good for the state and the nation as a whole. Don Jud, a professor emeritus of economics at UNCG, said Thursday that job losses in North Carolina make the problems associated with trade deals easy to illustrate. The benefits, he said, are real but sometimes harder to see.

"It's not so easy to identify all the people who benefit when they are able to go to the store and buy cheaper goods," Jud said. Rather than focus on renegotiating trade deals, Jud suggested the presidential contenders concentrate on offsetting the negative effects of manufacturing job losses.

In fact, that was a focus of Clinton's major policy statements Thursday.

During her Raleigh-area event, she unveiled a $2.5 billion per year plan to expand a variety of worker retraining programs. That money would go toward programs to help workers find new jobs after layoffs and expand the federal Pell Grant program for college education so workers who do not meet current income or enrollment guidelines could participate.

Clinton also proposed creating a job training program for workers who are not laid off but are at risk of losing their job because of troubles in their industries.

"You shouldn't have to produce a pink slip to train for a better, higher-paying job," Clinton said.

Obama released his own $30 billion economic plan Thursday, calling for funding to help those hurt by the subprime mortgage crisis and extending unemployment insurance for those out of work.

Republican party officials at the state and national level criticized both plans.

"Senator Clinton proved in her speech today that her understanding of the economy is rooted in only two things: tax and spend," wrote North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Linda Daves. "Senators Clinton and Obama have allied themselves with the failed liberal policies of the past."

Clinton responded to that Thursday night, saying criticism of her husband's administration in the 1990s made her chuckle.

"When I hear somebody criticizing the 1990s, I always think to myself: What is it they didn't like," Clinton quipped, "the peace or the prosperity?"

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com