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Date: Mon, 28 Dec 92 14:31:48 CST
From: carruth (matthew carruth)
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To: nyxfer!ww
Subject: Re: "Free" trade pact sparks labor resi


In article <gZ9ewB6w165w@nyxfer.uucp>, you write:
|> 
|> 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."

Anybody can find a single member of congress to make such a vague claim about 
anything.

|> 
|> 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.

I don't know what planet you live on, but in Dallas it was big news.  It was
also featured on NPR, hardly a facist organization.

|> 
|> 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.

You're correct here.  A lot of interest groups oppose it.  Trade unions don't
have clout in other countries, is there a Davis-Bacon act in Canada or Mexico?  Small
, and large, farmers live off the dole here in the US and are afaid it might end.  The
Green groups can only exist where there is a government to force their ideology on
everybody.  An international market makes it tougher to do so.

|> 
|> 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.

This is nonsense.  There was a front page story in the Wall Street Journal last week
that went into great detail on their objections  to NAFTA.  In addition, NPR has
done a series covering all points of view, including the unions.

|> 
|> 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.

You make "unleashing competition" sound like a bad thing.  The competitive
free market has made all the wealth that you are so interested in 
passing around.  Every country with tight restrictions on trade has had
a declining standard of living: Argentina, USSR, the entire East European
block, Chile (at one time), etc.  I think what you are really trying to say
is that certain groups may loose preffered treatment in a more open
market.  This may be bad for those groups, but other groups, like the
general public will benefit.

|> 
|> 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.

More nonsense. Mexican workers are already pitted against Can and US 
workers.  Opening the process further will created more jobs in Mexico.
The Mexican economy is booming.  When the statist policies of the past
began to be reversed the economy turned around.  

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

Yes, they  will move off their 2 cow farms and into jobs like my 
ancestors did 100 years ago.  It is the road to a better way of life.  I've
seen the way Mexican pesants live.  I don't think many of them would want to
continue it if they had a choice.

|> 
|> 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.

Pollution is bad in many parts of Mexico, but it is bad in most developing
countries.  Environmental programs cost a lot of money.  How can the economy
generate the money to pay for this kind of stuff if it doesn't grow?

|> 
|> 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.

Nafta was worked out by reps of the internationaly recognized governments in all
3 countries.  In the US the congress gave its explict approval to this.

|> 
|> AIM IS GREATER PROFITS

Yes, profits are the aim of every business transaction.  So what's your point?

|> 
|> 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.

This is a bad rewording of Marx's idea that a worker is robbed when he 
doesn't received the "full value of production".  Communist economies
have toppled around the globe, and more are about to fall.  Isn't it
time to put this to bed?

|> 
|> 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.

What?  The transition from Bush to Asia to E. Europe to S. American
patriots lost me. Does this paragraph make any sense?

|> 
|> 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.

Most industrial, Westren countries run higher unemployment rates than the US.
The US has the  most open economy.  I can see a connection... can you?  There
are people who will protest anything.  The US/Canada free trade pact was
the subject to intense national debate in Canda and was ratified by their
parliment.  Mulroney is really unpopular in Canada, now.  He has many 
problems, however.

|> 
|> 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."

A lot of Japanese and English banks are big players in the US.  Should we 
try to oust them?  Who should dominate an economy, anyway?  Should it be
banks or Socialist labor unions?

|> 
|> 
|> 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.

A lot of people work there, and traveled from all over Mexico to get there
on their own.  Mexico needs jobs.  NAFTA will create more.  If conditions
there are so bad they could go home or to the US.

|> 
|> 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.

Excuse me.  The previous governments in Mexico went on a wild debt binge and
bankrupted the country.  The STUPID American bankers lost a lot of money
on those loans.  Much has been written off, forgiven  and the rest 
has been renegotiated (many times).  Statist policies are the cause of
the Latin Debt problem, not bankers.

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

Maybe you've been on an extended trip to Tibet, but the Mexican economy
has been growing at fantastic rates for the last few years.  I wish the
US could have been so burdend.

|> 
|> 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.

The government in Mexico does have lots of problems.  The  PRI dominated 
government has built a political machine that has run the country for
decades.  The abuses there have been terrible.  Everything that I've
seen is that the PRI is ready to give it up. Check out the compostion of the
assembly, and state govenments.  Change is occuring.

|> 
|> 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.

The "Buy American" policies are variants of Japan's " Buy Only
Japanese Rice"  policy that everybody gets so upset over.

|> 
|> 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.

Please, spare us the tired, Marxist drivel.....

|> 
|> 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.

We all know that the reason that "Fast Track" authority is asked for and 
given is that special interest groups would make anything good for the
nation as a whole impossible to pass without it.  Clinton is not going
to renegotitate the agreement, but try to create separate agreements to
answer concerns by Labor, Green groups, etc.  These separate agreements
may sink NAFTA if passed, but may not, depending on what they say.

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

It's necessary.  The good of the country should come before special interest
groups.

|> 
|> 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.

Workers of the World Unite....

|> 
|> (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".)

Is the Workers World Service an organ of the Communist party?

|> 
|> 
|>  NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit
|>  Modem: 718-448-2358  *  Internet: nytransfer@igc.apc.org
|> 

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