From: guy@coos.dartmouth.edu (Guy Schiavone)
Subject: Howard Fast on NAFTA
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 19:36:51 GMT

The following is an interesting editorial on NAFTA by Howard Fast.
It is reproduced without permission from the Concord Monitor, 09-08-92,
pg. B5
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           Free-trade pact is poison for working people

            By Howard Fast
            For Greenwich Time

  President Bush has a dandy plan.  He proposes the creation of a "common
market" to include Mexico, the United States and Canada - no imposts, no
duties, a free and easy exchange of goods from one country to the other.
  In Monterrey, Mexico, there is a plant called the Iga Toy Factory.  The
workers on the assembly line make an average of $4 a day for a 10-hour day,
or 40 cents an hour.  The equivalent workers in the United States would earn
at least $5 an hour, or $40 for an eight-hour day.
  Question:  Why should any toy manufacturer in the United States
manufacture toys here and pay $40 for an eight-hour day, when he could move
south of the border and pay $4 for a 10-hour day.
  Question:  Why should any automobile manufacturer in the United States pay
his workers $15 an hour, when he can move south of the border and pay his
workers $1 an hour - workers more skilled than in the above-mentioned toy
factory.
  Question:  Why should any manufacturer of refrigrators, trucks, tractors
bicycles, dresses, suits, baby carriages, bathtubs, sinks, pipes, furniture,
steel beams, plastics, rugs, shoes - or a thousand other products stay in
the United States and pay the going wage, when he could move south of the
border and pay a dollar an hour or less.
  Fifty years ago, the population of Mexico was only 30 million, today, it
is well over 90 million and rising fast, producing an unlimited supply of
labor.  There is a one-party government, no real democratic tradition, and
few opportunities for Mexican labor to struggle for higher wages.
  The results of this plan that Bush puts forward are interesting.  The
profits of the leading corporations here would rise enormously.  They would
be able to compete successfully with other countries, and, indeed,
undersell them at times.
  Five percent of America would become very wealthy, and another 25 percent
 - stockholders, professionals and merchants - would share this increase in
wealth, but to a much lesser degree.  Perhaps 20 percent more would share to
one degree or another - service workers, people on fixed incomes, landlords,
etc.
  Then, there would be those engaged in office work, electronics, and
certain skilled manufacturing work requiring a degree of education not
yet to be found in Mexico.
  Altogether, this could amount to no more than 60 percent or 65 percent
of our working force and even with additional jobs in transportation and
retailing and government, we would most certainly lose 20 to 30 million
manufacturing jobs, and we would create a permanent pool of the unemployed
that would amount to many more millions than we have today.
  It is pure fantasy to imagine that we could ever create jobs for this
pool of the unemployed men and women who would very soon become
unemployable.  Either we would provide a dole to support them, or in their
hopelessness and desperation they would repeat on a scale a hundres times
larger what happened recently in Los Angeles; and because they are
well-armed (by virtue of Bush's attitude towards guns), these uprisings
would be bloody indeed.
  Every city would become a prison of hopelessness and horror; government
would become increasingly arbitrary and militaristic.  With its tax base
exhausted by the flight of the middle class and the increasing frustration
of the millions of unemployed, American cities would become something more
awful than any horror story of Stephen King.
  One can only predict that such a future would be awful beyond belief;
one cannot predict the details.  But one could look back at ancient Rome
and reflect on what happened when the great slave-holding plantation holders
replaced the small independent farmers.  A huge city population of plebs
was created, men and women who had no work or hope of work, who were fed
by dole and kept in leash by a combination of brute force and circuses of
brutality and horror, and who eventually brought about the end of Rome.
  Now, the administration economists will assure you that none of the above
will take place, that new wonder-industries will be created to replace the
dull and ordinary manufacturing jobs that go to Mexico, that we will all
of us share in the golden flow of profits that come from cheap Mexican
labor, and that we can all look forward to a prosperous and peaceful
future.
  But I wonder whether the thousands of men and women who lost their jobs
to Japan and Hong Kong and Korea and still have not found new jobs will
believe them.
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(Howard Fast is an author, playwright and screenwriter whose works include
Freedom Road, Citizen Tom Paine, Spartacus, The Immigrants, and, most
recently, the autobiography "Being Red")

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