Nov. 12—Since the United States entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, some 766,000 U.S. workers have lost jobs, as corporations move plants to Mexico and Canada to take advantage of lower wages, lax environmental rules and weak workers’ rights, according to Robert Scott, an economist with the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Yet despite the failures of NAFTA, the Bush administration is pushing for passage of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would expand the jobs loss and environmental damage experienced under NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere, eliminating tariffs from 34 countries with a population of more than 800 million.
Next week, tens of thousands of working families will travel to Miami, where trade ministers from throughout the hemisphere will meet Nov. 18–21 to discuss the next steps in creating the FTAA. Building on the rallies, marches and protests they held throughout the summer, a coalition of unions and their allies will join workers in South and Central America in support of trade agreements that guarantee workers’ rights. Workers from throughout the hemisphere will deliver hundreds of thousands of unofficial ballots to trade ministers, urging them to oppose the FTAA.
‘I Don’t Know What I’ll do if I Lose My Job’
They will be fighting on behalf of workers like Ucinda Sims, whose 20 years at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Lincoln, Neb., could end any day, now that the company has announced it is moving 480 U.S. production jobs to Mexico this year. The move would leave about 700 U.S. workers in a plant where 2,000 worked a few years ago.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose my job,” says Sims, 49, a member of Steelworkers Local 286. “I’m too old to work long enough somewhere else to earn a pension.”
Many single mothers with small children work in the plant and they all will be out of jobs, she says. “There’s nowhere for them to go for well-paying jobs” after another main employer, Cushman golf carts, closed down recently.
“It’s a shame what so-called free trade has done to the working people,” Sims says. “For every manufacturing job we lose, other people who supply the plant and feed the workers lose their jobs too. We can’t go on like this. It seems like the only ones who are getting anything good out of this are the companies.”
Free Trade Is Not Free
Workers in all three countries have been hurt by NAFTA, says EPI’s Scott. In Mexico, real wages have fallen sharply and there has been a big drop in the number of workers holding full-time jobs that pay family-supportive wages. In Canada, investment in education, health care, unemployment compensation and a wide range of other public services are eroding after a decade of heightened competition with the United States, he says.
“We are going to Miami to send a very clear message to those who developed an economic model based on exploitation. It is morally wrong to open markets to nations that have no labor standards,” says USWA President Leo Gerard. “We’re not against trade, but we believe that trade should be beneficial to everyone.”
More than 2,000 USWA activists will meet in Miami for an educational conference before mobilizing to make FTAA a key issue in the 2004 elections. “After 10 years of NAFTA, we’ve seen what it has done to America,” Gerard says. “And there is no possibility of changing direction unless we change the global trading system.”
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