[CTC] Loopholes in NAFTA 2.0 would allow companies to take jobs abroad

[Arthur Stamoulis]

https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20191102/column-no-loopholes-would-allow-companies-to-take-jobs-abroad <https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20191102/column-no-loopholes-would-allow-companies-to-take-jobs-abroad>

Loopholes would allow companies to take jobs abroad

By Carl Kennebrew
11/02/2019

As a manufacturing worker of more than 20 years, I can speak firsthand to the devastation that the North American Free Trade Agreement has caused to our workforce. So can the 150,000 active and retired members of my union, IUE-CWA. Time after time, NAFTA has allowed our major employers to shift good jobs out of this country.

Since NAFTA’s enactment in the mid-1990s, workers in Ohio and across the industrial Midwest have lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and millions more workers have seen their wages and benefits decline. Big companies have used corporate-friendly trade policies and the threat of shipping more jobs to Mexico to depress wages and benefits, hurting working families in our state. I’ve watched firsthand as manufacturing plants, like Delphi-owned Harrison Radiator and the General Motors Truck Plant in Dayton, have shut their doors due to outsourcing, leaving thousands out of work.

Aptiv PLC (formerly Delphi) for example, also has moved thousands of jobs to Mexico over the years. Other major employers like General Electric and Whirlpool have moved thousands more.

Because of NAFTA, these multinational corporations can easily move American jobs to Mexico, where workers have been exploited, unable to form democratic unions and make $2 an hour or less, and work without any rights or health and safety provisions.

Hardworking families on both sides of the border know we need a new deal to replace NAFTA, yet President Trump’s NAFTA replacement deal, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, is not acceptable for Ohio workers. USMCA, which is currently under negotiation with Congress, is a missed opportunity and one that relies on too many elements of the failed model of corporate-friendly trade policies that have harmed working families in recent decades.

The overriding goal of our failed model of trade policy is to make it easier for companies to move jobs and productions anywhere in the world. Whenever you hear talk of removing “trade barriers,” that’s usually shorthand for the range of legal and regulatory policies that allow big companies to exploit and underpay workers, avoid taxes and not have to abide by real labor or environmental standards.

This ends up a race to the bottom for all, harming workers on both sides of the offshoring equation and resulting not only in lost jobs in the U.S., but weakened bargaining power and lower wages for all as companies can threaten offshoring.

For a renegotiated NAFTA to work better for workers, it would need to level the playing field. That means that it would need to include strong labor and environmental standards with swift and certain enforcement mechanisms.

Unfortunately, President Trump’s USMCA deal doesn’t address these issues. There are still too many loopholes and weaknesses in the standards, and the enforcement mechanism actually takes a step backward from past deals, in which labor and environmental enforcement was already far too weak.

Far from leveling the playing field, the current USMCA proposal clearly was hijacked by special interests for their own profits. Specifically, it includes provisions which would extend protections surrounding pharmaceutical monopolies, ensuring that sky-high prescription prices remain in place for too many in our state and across the country. Despite past claims that lowering pharmaceutical prices is a top priority, the president’s administration is aiming to lock these prices in and even discourage or block future legislation that would force companies to lower their prices.

Doing the bidding of Big Pharma is not helping working families in Ohio.

As Sen. Sherrod Brown recently summarized, “I want to support a NAFTA 2.0, but this has fallen far short.”

Our state’s workers deserve more than this missed opportunity. We need a better deal than the USMCA.

Carl Kennebrew is president of IUE-CWA, Industrial Division of the Communications Workers of America, in Dayton.

Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826




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