Mexican labor leader says free trade deals kill jobs

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08099/871327-28.stm

Tuesday, April 08, 2008
By Ann Belser, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette
Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of a Mexican trade union, speaks at the United Steelworkers Building.


It was 11:34 a.m. yesterday when President Bush announced he would be fast-tracking the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia.

Half an hour later, at a forum on the North American Free Trade Agreement, Benedicto Martinez Orozco, the co-president of a Mexican trade union, told a filled hall at the United Steelworkers Building just how bad an idea the free trade agreements are.

In the first two years after Nafta was signed, Mr. Martinez said, thousands of small and midsize Mexican companies found they could not compete with the multinational companies that suddenly flooded the Mexican markets.

"In the first years thousands of middle-sized businesses closed, and that left thousands more workers without jobs," Mr. Martinez said through an interpreter. "Bigger companies bought up businesses, and we started to see the concentration of industries."

The result, he said, was that there were many people who became very rich, while now 14 years later, about half the population of the country, is either underemployed or unemployed.

FULL story at link.

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Which is why they are coming here!

Sure, everybody loves democracy, and people all over the world would like to be Americans, but they are coming here because here they can find jobs, while at home they cannot.

It's as simple as that.

Because of NAFTA we jumped from a population of @1 million undocumented workers to @13 million undocumented workers.

It's like when WalMart comes to town - it opens up 148 jobs -- but it shuts down the toy store, the furniture store, the hardware store, the men's apparel shop, the botique, the auto-parts store... And those displaced workers, if they do get a job at wallyworld, get paid less than before.

Same thing, on a national scale.