The hidden costs of free trade

November 5, 2007

WE HAVE already seen the devastating effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement in Massachusetts. According to conservative estimates, more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last decade alone. Nationally, at least 3 million jobs have been sent offshore, and the wage gap continues to expand.

Our trading partners have suffered, too - with huge increases in inequality and massive displacement. For example, at least 1.3 million Mexican farmers have lost their livelihood under NAFTA. As a result, the number of annual immigrants from Mexico to the United States surged from 332,000 in 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, to 530,000 in 2000 - a 60 percent increase.

Despite the unsatisfactory record of NAFTA as a "free trade" model, the neoliberal economic policy has continued its march forward in the same direction. This week, the Democratic-led Congress will have its first vote on the Bush administration's latest NAFTA-like expansion, the US-Peru bilateral free trade agreement.

Some Democrats are supporting this effort because President Alan Garcia of Peru has agreed to improve some international labor laws with presidential decrees. But Peruvian labor leaders think this is insufficient and will not protect the rights of the majority of people, 75 percent of whom work in the informal sector of the economy.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/11/05/the_hidden_costs_of_free_trade/

working people.

Is it time to ask: who in Congress has actually read the bill?

my wife and have lost 4 jobs since to nafta and had to move 3 times since 2000


http://www.workinglife.org/wiki/index.php?page=NAFTA+at+Seven%3A+Still+Hammering+Workers%2C+Jobs+and+Wages%2C+New+Study+Shows+%28May+4%2C+2001%29&highlight=nafta%20still%20hammering%20may%202001