NAFTA at 20: Lori Wallach on U.S. Job Losses

[pam4water]

LORI WALLACH: Well, not only haven’t the promises made by its proponents come true, but in most instances the actual opposite occurred. For instance, listening to President Clinton made my blood boil, because in no year of NAFTA were 200,000 jobs created. Rather, now 20 years out, one million net U.S. jobs have been lost to the growing trade deficit with Mexico and Canada under NAFTA, and there’s a list of an explicit 400,000 with Canada, 845,000 total jobs lost to NAFTA, specific workers certified under just one narrow program called Trade Adjustment Assistance that’s very hard to qualify for.

And on that end, if you want to see the actual effect of NAFTA in your community, you can go to our website, TradeWatch.org, look at the Trade Data Center. You can put in your zip code, and actually it will pop up the list of companies. A lot of them were companies that explicitly said during the NAFTA debate, "Congress, if you pass NAFTA, we’re going to create X number of jobs in Y community." And you can actually go by the company name and see Caterpillar, GE, Chrysler promising jobs then, offshoring jobs in reality, using NAFTA’s investor protections. Now, the one place that U.S. exports did grow was in dumping subsidized corn.

Over 1.5 million campesinos in Mexico displaced. As folks know, desperate immigration from Mexico after the NAFTA wipeout increased—doubled in the years after NAFTA. Meanwhile, in the corporate tribunals, over 365,000—sorry, $365 million have been paid out to corporations attacking environmental and health laws. So even the environmental improvements didn’t happen. Poverty increasing in Mexico, job offshoring in the U.S., and that is in effect across the economy. So if you weren’t one of the people who lost your job to NAFTA, the effect of having those million people displaced from higher-wage jobs meant they were competing for the service-sector jobs in the U.S. that aren’t subject to offshoring. So the government data shows that when someone lost their job to offshoring, on average, they lost 20 percent of their income and then went into the pool of people searching for non-offshorable jobs. So even in those sectors that are growing in the service sector, wages are flat or declining, which is a key factor to this growing income inequality.

That’s the reality of 20 years of NAFTA. But despite that, now the Obama administration is trying to do NAFTA on steroids, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which, given the record, is outrageous—can be stopped, but is pending.

From the transcript here.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/14/tpp_exposed_wikileaks_publishes_secret_trade

[pa28]

1. Hearing Bill Clinton's promises for NAFTA made my blood boil as well.

He promised higher wages and more jobs and everything short of a rainbow excreting unicorn.

I believe he knew then what the reality would be and he sold it to us anyway.

[markpkessinger]

2. NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall: two of the worst bills ever signed by a Democrat! n/t

[Jim Lane]

3. I agree, but while we're bashing Clinton, add in DOMA and welfare "reform". (n/t)

[markpkessinger]

4. No argument there! n/t