CAFTA: An Attack on Workers in Pennsylvania and Central America
By William M. George, President, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO
Imagine the scene. A husband and wife wake up one morning and drive to work together. They walk through the same doors they’ve entered for 30 years. Then, out of the blue, they’re called into a fateful meeting to learn that their jobs were just shipped to Mexico or China. Their services are no longer needed.
The $15/hour job, the health care benefits, and the retirement dreams have just disappeared.
Bad luck? Unavoidable? Unfortunately not.
Over the past decade, following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a similar scene has played out in hundreds of thousands of American households. The U.S. lost 900,000 jobs and job opportunities due to NAFTA, which devoted page upon page to safeguarding corporate interests, but excluded workers’ interests and protections.
In Pennsylvania, NAFTA destroyed more than 47,700 jobs from 1993 to 2002. Western Pennsylvania lost a thousand jobs in one swoop when companies like Cutler Hammer, Wheelabrator, and Anchor Hocking moved operations abroad.
Now the Bush Administration wants to dig the hole even deeper with the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), NAFTA’s little brother, and pro-CAFTA Republicans in Congress have declared that they want a vote on CAFTA by Memorial Day.
Last year, President Bush negotiated CAFTA with Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. This week the Presidents of these nations are visiting the White House in support of the agreement. But CAFTA would only extend to Central America the disastrous job loss and increasing inequality caused by NAFTA.
So-called “free trade”, under the rules crafted by corporate lobbyists, has devastated communities. Companies close or export their jobs, sending millions of skilled workers to look for low paying service jobs at places like Wal-Mart.
Today, the United States is losing jobs in every sector that is open to trade competition, from lumber, to aerospace, to clothing to call centers, and to software development. You name it, we’ve lost it. And CAFTA won’t bring it back.
In Mexico, NAFTA failed to deliver the promised reductions in poverty and inequality – in fact, poverty in Mexico is increasing. By flooding the market with highly subsidized American agricultural products, NAFTA destroyed 1.7 million farming jobs in Mexico, which has pushed small farmers to migrate away from their collapsing communities in search of work. Meanwhile, Mexican factory workers’ real wages have fallen since NAFTA was passed eleven years ago. Central American workers, teachers, farmers, and church leaders have learned from Mexico’s tough lesson and built a broad-based movement to oppose CAFTA. Due to the lack of worker rights in American Corporations and other foreign corporations in Central America, we have nine million undocumented workers in America.
The impacts of “free trade” are felt at home. It’s the state and the city that are left to deal with the lost jobs, the shuttered factories, and the falling tax revenue. As if that isn’t hard enough to swallow, CAFTA would impose a broad new set of restrictions on state governments on investment, services, and procurement. These restrictions could limit Pennsylvania’s right to enforce living wage ordinances or contract with local businesses.
That’s why opposition to CAFTA is growing right here in Pennsylvania. Last year, the state House introduced a bill requiring all state agencies hiring contractors to give preference to contracts whose work will be performed exclusively in the United States. State Rep. Jim Casorio has even called on Governor Rendell to investigate the security hazards sometimes posed by using imported labor. Pennsylvanians won’t tolerate another bad trade deal.
We need to find a better way. Trade agreements should serve people too – not just corporate interests. They should allow workers throughout the Americas to compete and survive in the global economy by rewriting the rules – building in safeguards for workers’ rights, human rights, and the environment.
What we do not need is another trade deal like CAFTA, which does nothing to encourage Central America to curb poverty and worker abuses. Forty percent of Central America’s workers earn less than two dollars a day and workers’ rights are routinely abused. CAFTA does absolutely nothing to protect workers’ fundamental human rights. Under the CAFTA system, multinational corporations will speed up their global race to the bottom on wages and workplace protections.
The first step in turning around the trade crisis is for Congress to reject CAFTA. We need to stop losing jobs, not speed up the process.
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