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http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0412-01.htm
(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 ChrČtien,
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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