From: ww@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican
Date: 26 Dec 92 19:55 PST
Subject: "Free" trade pact sparks labor resi
Nf-ID: #N:gZ9ewB6w165w@nyxfer.uucp:672288983:000:6210
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!ww    Dec 26 19:55:00 1992


Subject: "Free" trade pact sparks labor resistance
From: nyxfer!ww (Workers World Service)

 
Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


"Free trade" pact sparks labor resistance

By Lal Roohk

The presidents of the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed the North
American Free Trade Agreement on Dec. 18 in their respective
capitals. It was the culmination of what one member of the U.S.
Congress called "15 months of the most secretive trade negotiations
I've ever monitored."

The signing of this major pact didn't make headline news. It was
buried in the business pages. But organized labor was on the alert.

In the U.S., a broad coalition of trade unions, environmentalists
and small farmers' organizations held demonstrations opposing NAFTA
in some 50 cities, from New York to Los Angeles.

Unions including the building trades, Electrical Workers, Food and
Commercial Workers, Garment Workers, Machinists, Mine Workers,
Paper Workers, Service Employees, Steel Workers, Textile Workers
and Teamsters outlined their opposition to the pact in dozens of
news conferences. But the only media coverage 
they received was an ad the unions bought.

REASONS FOR UNION OPPOSITION

Their opposition is based on the following points:

The competition unleashed by NAFTA would encourage greater
exploitation of workers, thereby undermining labor, environmental
and other social standards.

NAFTA will depress wages and working conditions in all three
countries by pitting U.S. and Canadian workers against oppressed
Mexican workers. "Hardest hit will be lower-skilled, poorer,
minority, migrant and women workers," said the unions' statement.

NAFTA will displace millions of small farmers and farm workers in
all three countries, thereby creating more unemployment.

NAFTA has no provision to protect against the spread of
environmental devastation. U.S. corporations, with their
maquiladoras (factories in free-trade zones) along the Mexican
border, have already polluted much of that region.

Working people have had no voice in the trade talks. NAFTA was
hammered out behind closed doors in the boardrooms of the largest
U.S. banks and corporations.

AIM IS GREATER PROFITS

Like corporate restructuring, the U.S. "free trade" policy is a
strategy designed to find new ways of sucking more and more profits
out of the productive labor of working people at home and abroad.

President George Bush made a morning appearance in Detroit on the
same day he signed the treaty in Washington. There, Bush said that
Eastern European and Asian nations might someday join the North
American free-trade area. He showed his tremendous insensitivity to
Latin America by invoking the name of Simon Bolivar, its liberator
from Spanish colonial rule. Bush said U.S. "free trade" would one
day extend from Alaska to Argentina.

The Bush administration has already concluded some trade agreements
with Canada. In Ottawa, protesters disrupted the NAFTA signing
ceremony, accusing Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of lying about the
agreements. Canadian workers blame Mulroney for the 11.8-percent
unemployment rate, saying the 1989 Free Trade Agreement with the
U.S. accelerated joblessness.

The Canadian economy is dominated by U.S. banks. Mexican workers
see both the U.S. and Canadian bosses ganging up on them. Rigoberto
Avila Ordonez, a representative of the Party of the Democratic
Revolution, recently said, "Until our economies are more equal, we
can't develop in a beneficial way and `free trade' won't work."


NAFTA would have some merit if it helped strengthen the Mexican
economy. But the maquiladoras show what potential NAFTA holds for
Mexico. While the average hourly wage for a manufacturing job in
Mexico is $1.80, in the maquiladoras it averages $1.25 an hour and
ranges as low as 57 cents.

U.S. banks squeeze the Mexican economy through extortionate
interest payments. U.S. corporations undermine it by draining off
huge profits. When the U.S. economy is in a downturn, workers in
oppressed countries like Mexico take a super beating.

As economic conditions in Mexico worsen, displaced and unemployed
Mexican workers are forced to take jobs with degrading conditions
in the maquiladoras.

The official trade unions of Mexico are completely bound to the
ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and have no independence
from the government. There is a militant opposition trade-union
movement in Mexico, but it suffers brutal repression. There is no
outcry in the U.S. big-business media when dissident Mexican
trade-union leaders are jailed and tortured.

CHANGE IN LABOR'S POSITION

NAFTA has made workers in the U.S. labor movement more conscious of
the conditions their Mexican brothers and sisters face. The top
AFL-CIO bureaucrats have for years set a chauvinist, xenophobic
trade policy for the union movement with their "Buy American"
slogans. Today, a new policy is emerging in the ranks of labor.

Unionists are saying that only through solidarity, through a
struggle to fight for improved conditions for Mexican workers, can
workers here help themselves. This makes so much more sense that
the old reactionary slogans seem to be losing steam.

Now that NAFTA has been signed, the legislatures of all three
countries have to approve it. In the U.S., NAFTA will wait until
Bill Clinton submits it to Congress. He has promised to renegotiate
some of the terms. Much of the opposition to NAFTA in the U.S.
labor movement is directed toward asking Clinton for a voice in the
renegotiation.

However, Congress willingly tied its hands last year by passing
"fast track" legislation. This bars any amendments to the NAFTA
agreement.

In general, Clinton has endorsed all the "free trade" policies of
the Bush administration. Workers can't depend on him. Their real
power lies in closing ranks with Mexican and Canadian workers.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "workers@mcimail.com".)


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