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(excerpt):"...The
left could embrace the battered working class at home and unashamedly
acknowledge that its first responsibility is to the citizens of the U.S.
and Canada, now being sold out by the political elites. If Americans
want to help the
world's poor we can lead by example... U.S.-style "free trade"
is already wrecking Mexico;
must it now wreck the rest of the hemisphere in the name of helping
it?..."
entire article below:
The Secret Free-Trade Agenda
Accessing cheap foreign labour is good for companies,
but only dreamers think it benefits workers
Published on Thursday, April 12, 2001 in the Toronto Globe & Mail
by John R. MacArthur
The upcoming "free-trade" fest of politicians and their
tenured valets (also known as economists) in Quebec City has provoked
the usual posturing from both sides of the global political divide, with
leftists denouncing the conclave as antidemocratic, exploitative of the
Third World and skewed toward further enriching the rich. These critics
of "globalization" are not wrong, of course -- the two miles
of chain link fence surrounding the FTAA conference area and the 6,000
cops serve to make their point better than they are capable of doing. We
can safely say that President George W. Bush and his 33 would-be
counterparts are not coming to La Belle Province with a plan to feed the
masses more equitably.
But this doesn't stop the left, as well as large elements of organized
labour from playing straight into the hands of powerful interests they
purport to despise. In every do-gooder attack against the White House
and its academic henchman on the trade issue, one can hear the flip side
of American hegemonic arrogance -- a belief that the world can be
reformed across frontiers into a global system of liberal social
justice.
We demand, cries much of the left, that the U.S. and Canadian
governments make the rest of the world more like we are; we demand
reform in China and Sri Lanka in our own image. To this collective plea
comes the specious reply from Jean ChrÈtien, the Bushes (father and
son) and the new Democrats led by Bill Clinton: Why, "free
trade" will do just that by making everybody richer, and freer.
So much time is wasted praying, or chanting, for international social
change, that the left can hardly see the damage being done directly in
front of it, here or in very nearby Mexico. So frightened are the
antiglobalists of being called ugly, old-fashioned nationalists, that
they can't see what's good about what they've still got -- a partially
functioning democracy with labour laws and a minimum wage.
Similarly, the AFL-CIO so dreads being called "protectionist"
and "Luddite" that it concedes the "inevitability"
of so-called globalization. We must, says the union hierarchy, make the
global system more fair, not raise U.S. tariffs or penalize companies
that export factory jobs. Every year, the labour federation president
John Sweeney attends the World Economic Forum in Davos and lectures the
attendees on their moral responsibility to the workers of the
world. He would do better if he stayed home and organized a sit-down
strike in front of Motorola corporate headquarters in Schaunburg, Ill.
Motorola, already non-union, recently closed its last domestic cellular
phone factory and is currently building a huge new phone and
semiconductor plant in cheap-labour China, a country that will never
have U.S. or Canadian-style labour law.
It's not for lack of information that the left and the union bosses lose
their nerve when the conversation turns global. NAFTA is a fine test
case for anyone fantasizing about international labour and environmental
agreements raising standards in the poorer countries. Due largely to
NAFTA, by the end of 2000 there were about 3,700 maquiladoras in Mexico,
mostly concentrated along the U.S. border, employing 1.35 million
people.
These assembly platforms, many of them deceptively modern and clean, are
the big lie of the free-trade lobby. Most of their workers still make
about $1 an hour for a 48-hour week; huge numbers subsist in sprawling
shack cities with no running water or electricity.
Visit a border city -- Matamoros; Juarez; Nogales; Tijuana -- and you
will be appalled by the open sewers, the parched landscapes, the
gimcrack structures made from pallets and tar paper, the ragged
children. Here, the Mexican worker can join the official union, the CTM,
but woe unto anyone who seeks to form an independent union that actually
fights for higher wages; he may pay with his life.
The new reform President of Mexico (and former Coca-Cola comprador),
Vicente Fox, has so far done nothing substantial to deregulate his
country's monopoly union, which helps keeps wages down and U.S.
factories humming. A realist, he understands how much Mexico, stripped
of tariff protection by former president Carlos Salinas, has become a
labour colony of the United States. One fact tells the story: Last year
Mexican contributions of raw material and components to maquiladora
production fell to a microscopic .82 per cent from an already
infinitesimal 1.07 per cent in 1999.
And yet the free traders have the gall to promote NAFTA and FTAA as
foreign aid to the disadvantaged, rather than exploitation of the
indigent. Even worse, they tout the NAFTA "side agreements,"
allegedly designed to protect labour rights and the environment in
Mexico. Not one such case before a NAFTA "tribunal" has
resulted in real redress for Mexican working stiffs. (As well, remember
the U.S. environmentalists suckered into supporting NAFTA in hope of
cleaning up the Rio Grande. It's now filthier than ever.)
Of course, no respectable economist would call NAFTA or FTAA a
free-trade agreement because real free trade implies not only duty-free
movement of goods and capital, but free movement of labour across
borders, which neither the U.S. nor Canada can tolerate. Pure free trade
is a utopian madhouse, even crazier in concept than communism. Just
imagine the damage to the social structure -- not to mention wages -- if
either country permitted unlimited Mexican immigration.
The naive, internationalist left can't face these facts of life.
Manufacturing employment, which usually pays better, went into free fall
in the United States long before the stock market began its slide -- for
what business person in his right mind could pass up dollar-an-hour
wages (with little pension or health insurance obligation) so close to
the home market, or the even cheaper labour available in China? The
political question becomes: Who speaks for the former factory worker now
cleaning offices or flipping hamburgers?
There is an alternative: The left could embrace the battered working
class at home and unashamedly acknowledge that its first responsibility
is to the citizens of the U.S. and Canada, now being sold out by the
political elites. If Americans want to help the world's poor we can lead
by example, we can fight for more foreign aid, or -- not the worst
alternative -- we can leave the dispossessed foreigners alone.
U.S.-style "free trade" is already wrecking Mexico; must it
now wreck the rest of the hemisphere in the name of helping it?
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's
Magazine and the author of The Selling of 'Free
Trade': NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of
American Democracy.
Copyright © 2001 Globe Interactive
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