NAFTA -- some facts and opinions

[JDPriestly]

NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA, “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils.

NAFTA requires limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.

http://www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/

The following Department of Labor data capture only a limited number of total job losses caused by trade liberalization and corporate globalization. Only certain workers in specific types of industries who lose jobs are eligible and of these, for a variety of reasons, many will not apply for assistance through these programs. It has been estimated, for example, that less than 10 percent of all workers who lost their jobs in import-sensitive manufacturing industries in 1999 received TAA benefits that year (Howard Rosen, "Reforming Trade Adjustment Assistance" February 26, 2002). A more comprehensive, state-by-state estimate of jobs lost and created by trade liberalization is available at the Economic Policy Institute.

These databases do, however, provide examples of geographic areas and economic sectors particularly hard hit by trade and globalization. They list specific jobs certified by the government as having been lost to trade. Although only the tip of the iceberg, they provide a sample of real people's experiences. Each of the three data-sets provides searchable, company- and state-level information on approved certifications and the estimated number of workers covered for the following time periods:

http://www.citizen.org/trade/forms/taa_info.cfm

An estimated 1,113,538 US workers were certified as eligible for the Trade Adjustment Assistance program between 1994 and the end of 2002--the era of NAFTA and the global World Trade Organization (WTO) pacts. This program, established under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, originally provided assistance to workers who lost their jobs or whose wages had been significantly reduced as a result of increased imports. To qualify, groups of workers at affected facilities first had to apply for certification; if that was granted, then they had to file individual applications for benefits with their local Unemployment Insurance (UI) agency. For the first 12 years of its existence, very few workers received benefits due to rigid eligibility criteria. These were eased in 1974 and between then and 1999 an estimated 3 million workers were certified as eligible for benefits under the program.

Sizeable numbers of workers affected by imports from Canada or Mexico after the implementation of NAFTA are included in these general (non-NAFTA specific) TAA certifications. Some major industrial unions advised their NAFTA-impacted members to apply under the general TAA program because it provided the same benefits as the NAFTA-TAA but had easier administrative requirements. After NAFTA went into effect, workers could apply to be certified under both general TAA and the dedicated NAFTA-TAA, even though they could only receive benefits under one. Our comparison of certification records across NAFTA-TAA and regular TAA found a level of duplication that would make any combination of totals (by state or nationally) from the two databases inaccurate. This, of course, has no impact on the reliability of certification information within each individual program.

http://www.citizen.org/trade/forms/taa_search.cfm?dataset=2

[John Crighton]

1. Exploitation of cheap foreign labor

That is the singular agenda of free trade, and nothing more. We've all been duped.

Cheap foreign labor = slavery.