Think again

CAFTA, like NAFTA, will be a graveyard for American jobs

By TIM NESBITT
President, Oregon AFL-CIO

Here’s a challenge to proponents of more “free trade” deals, such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) now awaiting ratification by Congress: Show us the jobs.

Prove your point: Count the jobs, tally the paychecks. Show us that we’ve gained more than we’ve lost from these trade deals, as you promised when Congress approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and preferential trading status for China in 2001.

I delivered that challenge for the first time in November 2001, when I addressed the Pacific Northwest International Trade Association (PNITA), the leading “free trade” lobby in Oregon. In the course of my presentation, I held up a printout of job losses, which the U.S. Department of Labor determined were caused by expanded trade with Canada and Mexico under NAFTA. At that time, those job losses in Oregon totaled 13,411.

At first, many of the business people at the PNITA forum refused to accept those job-loss numbers. I had to pass around the printout. Clearly, they believed that expanded trade with Mexico and Canada was good for Oregon. But the Labor Department data challenged their beliefs.

When they regrouped during the question and answer session, they went right to the central arguments about “free trade.” Didn’t we gain more jobs than we lost? And weren’t the new jobs better than the old jobs?

No and no, I answered. I cited studies by the Economic Policy Institute showing more jobs lost under NAFTA than jobs gained — a net loss of 11,000 in Oregon, and other studies showing that the average worker displaced from a manufacturing job due to import competition earns 13 percent less in his or her new job.

But their response overall was more incredulous than combative. They just couldn’t believe what I was telling them. So I asked them if they could cite one study that purports to show job gains from NAFTA. No one could.

I repeated that challenge to representatives of PNITA and the U.S. State Department at a forum two years later at Portland State University. The only answer I got from the State Department official was that my data couldn’t be right. I asked him to produce even one study to refute the Economic Policy Institute’s findings of the net job losses under NAFTA. I’m still waiting.

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor says we lost another 17,000 jobs in Oregon due to NAFTA and other trade agreements from January 2001 through August 2004.

Last Monday, at yet another forum on trade at the University of Portland, workers from all over Oregon held up signs documenting plant closures and mass layoffs caused by NAFTA and other trade agreements. Their signs looked like tombstones in an economic graveyard touching every corner of the state, from Beaverton (Tyco, 600 workers) to Klamath Falls (Collins Products, 910 workers) to Nyssa (Amalgamated Sugar, 477 workers).

And yet the free traders at the forum still whistled a happy tune about NAFTA and CAFTA as they walked past the tombstones. They had no new studies to back them up, nothing to refute the job losses and shrinking pay checks of American workers, just their unshakable faith that if these trade deals are good for Nike and Intel, they must be good for Oregon.

Proponents of CAFTA are making the same promises they made 12 years ago to promote NAFTA — that we’ll gain more jobs than we’ll lose and create better-paying jobs for U.S. workers, because we’ll be able to export more of what we produce here to the CAFTA countries. Yeah, right. With as many people as California, the CAFTA countries are large enough to be attractive to U.S. corporations. But, since 40 percent of their workers earn less than $2 a day, these countries won’t be competing to buy our products, they’ll be competing to make them.

Members of Congress from both parties continue to parrot the myths about jobs gained and paychecks fattened from these flawed corporate trade deals. Many will try to make the same arguments when CAFTA comes up for a vote this year. When they do, demand that they show us the jobs we were supposed to gain from trade with Mexico and China. They can’t. We have the obituaries that prove just the opposite.

So if our representatives in Congress care about jobs in the U.S. and jobs in Oregon, as they all say they do, remind them that we now know all too well what these trade deals mean for working families. And tell them you expect them to cast their votes on fact-based reality not faith-based mythology.

Tim Nesbitt is president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. For more information, check out the Oregon AFL-CIO online at oraflcio.unions-america.com