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Ftaa will send jobs overseas Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/focus/7264446.htmhttp://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/focus/7264446.htm
Posted on Sun, Nov. 16, 2003
FTAA DEBATE | AGAINST
Agreement will just send more U.S. jobs overseas
BY JOHN J. SWEENEY
Ten years ago this week, Congress voted to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This Thursday, trade ministers from 34 countries will meet here in Miami to mark another milestone in negotiations toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would essentially extend NAFTA to the rest of the hemisphere (except for Cuba).
The FTAA is mired in controversy. Tens of thousands of peaceful protesters are expected to greet the trade ministers in Miami, expressing their strong opposition to the model of corporate-centered global trade rules embodied in NAFTA, and now being replicated on a larger scale in the FTAA.
Working people, environmentalists, people of faith, family farmers, and human rights and anti-poverty activists from all over the hemisphere will come together this week to resoundingly reject the FTAA, demanding more fairness and transparency in the trade rules that affect all of our lives.
The massive loss of decent jobs here since early 2001 makes the FTAA debate a matter of critical importance to millions of American workers and their families. Our nation has lost 3 million net private-sector jobs since the Bush administration took office. Last month marked the 38th straight month in which we lost manufacturing jobs. Even the uptick in overall jobs in the last quarter consisted mainly of low-paying service jobs, 40 percent in temp and retail.
Economists identify outsourcing and exploding trade deficits as one key cause of the so-called ''jobless recovery.'' Yet in the face of this disastrous job record, President Bush is negotiating yet another flawed trade agreement that will send more American jobs overseas.
The key issues now, as when NAFTA was adopted, are good jobs, development, and democracy. NAFTA failed to deliver on all three counts, and the FTAA is set to follow the same path.
NAFTA was supposed to open Mexico's consumer market to more U.S. exports, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs in this country. But instead of exporting more U.S. products to Mexican consumers, multinational companies took advantage of NAFTA's new investment rules and lower tariffs and shifted jobs out of the United States, increasing our imports from both Canada and Mexico much faster than our exports. The result is that the U.S. trade deficit with our NAFTA partners has grown almost tenfold, from $9 billion in 1993 to $87 billion in 2002.
LOSS OF JOBS
The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that this explosion of our NAFTA trade deficit has cost almost three-quarters of a million U.S. jobs -- 27,000 here in Florida. So Floridians should look skeptically on the rosy predictions that the FTAA and its secretariat will bring 89,000 jobs to Florida. With sensitive sectors like citrus and sugar on the negotiating table, and the dismal job-destruction record of NAFTA's first decade behind us, these predictions ring hollow.
Nor did NAFTA improve U.S. competitiveness with the rest of the world. Our global trade deficit has more than tripled since 1993, from $133 billion to $484 billion.
RURAL POVERTY
One of the main selling points of NAFTA was that it would alleviate poverty in Mexico. However, the opposite has occurred. Mexican real wages are actually lower today than before NAFTA, while the rural economy is experiencing traumatic upheavals. Meanwhile, the number of people in poverty in Mexico has grown from 62 million to 69 million.
Mexico's economic growth has been mediocre, and the number of migrants leaving in search of a better life has grown, despite then-President Salinas's boast that with NAFTA, Mexico would export tomatoes, not tomato-pickers. While NAFTA certainly spurred greater flows of trade and investment, average Mexican workers and farmers have not seen many benefits.
Proposed FTAA rules are aimed at constraining the ability of national and local governments to implement their own laws, to protect the environment or public health, for example. This back-door deregulation is never highlighted by the trade agreement supporters, but comes back to bite us years later when regulations come under attack because they are ''incompatible with our obligations'' under NAFTA or other trade agreements.
FIX EXISTING SYSTEM
We need to fix the problems we already have with NAFTA, not extend them through an FTAA. The FTAA, as currently conceived, would mean more lost jobs, closed plants, devastated communities, and ruined lives here in the United States and throughout the hemisphere.
The AFL-CIO, along with our union brothers and sisters and fair-trade allies in the Western Hemisphere, has called for a different kind of social and economic integration for the Americas. It must incorporate enforceable workers' rights and environmental standards and ensure that governments retain the right and ability to provide essential public services and to regulate in the public interest.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has prioritized corporate investment rules at the expense of workers' rights, and the FTAA negotiations are seriously off track.
With the worst job-
creation record since Herbert Hoover, the last thing the Bush administration needs is a new and expanded job-destroying free-trade agreement for the entire hemisphere. It is time for our policymakers to wake up and take an honest look at NAFTA's dismal record before continuing down this path.
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