U.S. workers fear trade agreement repercussions

(Rochester Business Journal)

The Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), signed May 28, 2004, between the United States, the Dominican Republic and five Central American countries is a severe blow to America’s working families.  Debate is currently underway in Washington about the approval of this legislation.  

For the first time since workers in North and South America  fought against consolidating the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in 2003, the Bush administration is pushing a bilateral trade agreement.  Their timing couldn’t be worse.

CAFTA includes no worker protections such as health and safety regulations or the right to form a Union, and the Bush administration has made it a top priority.  What a surprise – another trade agreement that gives workers the boot while lining the pockets of the corporate elite.

National AFL-CIO president John Sweeney has says the Bush administration has negotiated an agreement that will utterly fail to create good jobs at home or promote equitable and sustainable development in Central America.

According to the AFL-CIO CAFTA will leave family farmers, the environment and working families more vulnerable all the while – making our nations corporations exponentially wealthier.  Sound familiar?  These are the same problems we have experienced under NAFTA.

 
Under CAFTA, tariffs  would be removed from the United States, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica. CAFTA will infect our southern neighbors with the devastating environmental damage and job loss that have crippled our economy in the 10 years since passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

In the United States, workers have lost almost 900,000 jobs and in Mexico real wages have fallen during 10 years under  NAFTA, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.

Recently, Human Rights Watch highlighted the plight of workers in Central America who are often denied such basic rights as the right to bargain collectively.  Meanwhile the Bush Administration continues to fight for exclusion of  any workers rights issues in CAFTA regulations.

Recently, more than 1,000 workers from the United States and the Dominican Republic joined union leaders and members of Congress to tell Capitol Hill lawmakers not to allow passage of CAFTA. 

Congress is currently holding hearings on the agreement.

Personal testimony is not hard to find.  Workers across the United States are telling the story of how NAFTA destroyed their livelihood and their entire communities.  Right here in Rochester we have seen our own manufacturing jobs shipped to Mexico while our own economy has suffered.  The toll on workers and their families is immeasurable.  Now the Bush administration with support from Corporate America wants to extend trade deals even further away to the Dominican Republic and Central America. 

A recent survey by Americans for Fair Trade showed that 51% of all Americans across party lines oppose CAFTA all together and only 31% support the agreement.  Voters who were surveyed expressed concern about the long term impact of CAFTA on our economy and our workforce. 

The AFL-CIO recently kicked off a Cross Country ‘CAFTA—We Don’t Hafta’ Tour and the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council (IUC) hosted  nearly 1,300 workers from 12 unions who met to address health care costs, the Bush administration’s scheme to privatize Social Security and the nation’s decline in manufacturing jobs—a decline that in no small part has resulted from bad trade deals such as CAFTA. 

The “CAFTA––We Don’t Hafta” tour sent workers from the United States, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Guatemala to  Washington, D.C., New York City and San Antonio. In each city, four nation’s workers have taken part in town hall meetings to open a dialogue about the impact of free trade deals such as CAFTA.  In school rooms, town halls, libraries and union halls, workers across the nation will talk about how these trade deals erode workplace standards, poison economic development and line the pockets of corporate America.

Participants from the “CAFTA, we don’t hafta” tour includ two Dominican union leaders, Ignacio Hernandez, secretary general of the Federation of Free Trade Zone Workers in the Dominican Republic and Rafael Abreu of the General Workers’ Central, both of whom have spoke eloquently about working conditions in their countries.  These men have described how workers are denied their rights, including the freedom to form a union, and how CAFTA would make the situation worse.

Back here in the United States we continue to hemmorage good family sustaining job opportunities.  Recently the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the loss of another 6,000 manufacturing jobs in April. Manufacturing employment fell to 14.3 million in March 2005 as a result of escalating health care costs and irresponsible trade policies which encourage our employers to export our work

Since George W. Bush took office, manufacturing job losses account for most of our private-sector employment losses.  Union workplaces have been affected particularly hard by these losses – having fallen from 28 percent of all manufacturing jobs in 1983 to only 13 percent in 2004.

While the echos of laughter remain from last year’s Bush Administration effort to reclassify fast food service work as “manufacturing” It’s not too hard to imagine President Bush presenting CAFTA to Congress as if from a menu and exclaiming with pride ”Would you like fries with that?”