This diary will discuss the human side of NAFTA and other such free trade agreements — the negative impact on people in third-world countries and the environmental degradations that happen as well.
Wal-Mart is one of the biggest beneficiaries of these free trade agreements. They have moved operations to China where in an effort to cut costs, they demand that suppliers create sweatshops which treat workers inhumanely and pay them subminimum wages.
Hillary Clinton served on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart from 1985-1992. Bill’s free trade policies directly benefitted Wal-Mart, as they were able to expand their mammoth profits at the expense of turning humans into machines.
First of all, Free Trade agreements have cost people their livelyhoods. People have gone from making as much as $90,000 to completely unemployed as companies outsource their jobs for cheap labor. Some examples follow of people whose lives were ruined.
In Colorado, the wife of a man who lost his job to outsourcing shot herself and her two children:
The murder-suicide deaths of a Colorado Springs mother and her two young sons left a husband and father without a family. While depression is blamed, the fact is another American breadwinner lost his software engineering job and was forced to relocate to the East Coast to earn a living while his family stayed behind.
When his wife lost her temp job and expressed growing despair, friends called local police who took her to a hospital for evaluation. Jobless, probably without medical insurance, her husband thousands of miles away and aware her children were too young to be alone, she checked herself out of the hospital, bought a handgun, and chose a permanent solution to a growing problem: foreigners taking jobs Americans need with the blessing of our so-called “representatives”.
While I do not agree with the anti-immigrant undertones of the article, it illustrates the fact that we are dealing with human lives when we are dealing with free trade. The article goes on to describe how Governor Bill Owens killed a bill which would have prohibited the hiring of contractors who practice “offshoring.”
In fact, if the right is so serious about immigration, they why are they supporting NAFTA in the first place? NAFTA drives down wages in the third world, so that poor Mexicans feel they have no choice but to come here, where they will get paid more.
Here is the story of a woman who was lied to and told that her $90,000-a-year job was safe when it wasn’t. She was sent to India to train workers, and only after she come back did she find out she was training them to take over her job:
“The thing that frightens me most is the talk of outsourcing ultimately benefiting the American worker. Though we’ve been sending low wage jobs offshore for years, we have no historical reference for the effects of upper-level positions being offshored. The economy is not going to absorb people who used to make six figures as it did with low-paying jobs–so many people in California are working for fractions of their former wages.
“Losing my job has put a real strain on my family as well. I raise my six-year-old child alone. He suffers from sickle-cell anemia, and seeing the stress unemployment has put on me only makes things harder for him. When I asked him what his New Year’s resolution was he said, `To get Mommy a job so she’ll be happy again.'”
This illustrates a problem that high-paid workers experience when they lose their jobs — they have trouble finding work. They apply for lower-level jobs, but people refuse to hire them because they’re “overqualified.” Employers do not wish to hire people who they think will either leave the company for a step up the ladder in a few years or try to run things their own way and overwhelm the current employees.
This article from Stephen Bucaro of Sensible Software predicts that 14 million more jobs will be sacrificed in the future on top of the 3 million already lost, as the Clinton and Bush administrations are willing and able to outsource these jobs in order to keep the peace:
Over the past three years, 3 million American jobs have
been outsourced, primarily to China and India. A study by
UC Berkeley predicts that as many as 14 million more jobs
will be lost. Why doesn’t our government do something? Has
our government and the Bush administration been asleep on
the job? To the contrary, the government is using the
export of your job as a political tool.
He goes on to list a number of jobs which are seemingly secure, but which can be outsourced. His theory is that the US is exporting these jobs so that these countries will not become military powerhouses and pose a threat to the US. He says that, say, a war between India and Pakistan or the US and China would disrupt their economies, so it would not be in their interests to wage war.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that is reeks of mediocrity. We should be finding solutions to conflict that do not involve the needless expenditure of anybody’s jobs as the price of keeping peace. This approach simply sweeps the problems involved under the rug when bringing the parties to the table to forge a lasting peace and work out differences would be a much superior solution.
In addition to the hardships on American workers, free trade agreements turn third-world countries into toxic waste dumps. For example, the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade points out that many hazardous waste companies locate to Mexico because of their lax environmental laws and their low wages:
For example, in response to citizen complaints about the recurrent and highly hazardous pollution produced by Stephan Chemical’s pesticide plant in Matamorros, the Mexican Environment Protection Federal Attorney’s Office declared the plant and the surrounding area a “high risk” zone. Without considering any alternatives, it then ordered the displacement of the population of thirteen towns and five communal lands in the area in order to permit the company to continue operations.
Much of the increase in environmental contamination is accounted for by a few large firms that dominate the local economy. Approximately 80% of the total value of the Mexican export industry is controlled by two percent of the total number of companies in the country, most of which are transnational corporations. Many of these (particularly those in the electronics, textile and chemical sectors) are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as industries utilizing highly toxic and dangerous processes. Even official statistics, however, show that only 10% of the seven million tons of toxic waste these industries generate is properly treated.
This is typical right-wing behavior — make policies which make people poor and then blame the poor when they complain. The problem with the right-wing mentality is that it is based on the faulty premise that some people are more equal than others. You see that most blatantly in the Amway scam, where if you don’t get enough people signed up, it is somehow your fault and you are a loser.
Jennifer Clapp of the Basel Action Network, an anti-toxic waste group, writes that the amount of toxic waste going to Mexico has increased by over 1 1/2 times and the amount of toxic waste plants has doubled. Also:
The first troubling development is the doubling of hazardous waste imports into Mexico since 1994. Most of this waste comes from the US. The Texas Center for Policy Studies has reported that the US-to-Mexico waste flow increased from 143,800 tonnes in 1995 to 230,865 tonnes in 1999.(1)
These imports, including electric arc furnace dust (EAD), lead acid-batteries, containers from hazardous waste, and accumulators, have come primarily from the US and are destined for recycling operations in Mexico.(2) Trade liberalization has also made the cross-boundary movements easier, despite NAFTA’s explicit intent to improve the hazardous waste management situation in Mexico.
A second post-NAFTA development that affects hazardous waste burdens in Mexico is the sizeable increase in the number of maquiladora plants. These primarily US-owned factories were set up in the 1960s to produce goods for export to the US under a special program that gave them reduced import duties for parts processed in the plants.
The number of such plants in Mexico increased from 1704 in 1990 to 3297 in 1999. (3) The reason for this is not so much the introduction of NAFTA, but rather the devaluation of the peso in 1995, which made investment in such plants extremely attractive for US manufacturers.(4)
Again, if the Republicans are serious about stopping immigration from Mexico, the way to control it is not by carping and griping about the lack of border security and the lack of prisons. The way to do it is by addressing these pollution problems. After all, I would not want to live next to a toxic pollution factory; why should we make other people live near such a place?
The problems with NAFTA are so widespread, that whole college courses are being devoted just to going to Mexico and studying the effects of NAFTA on people. For instance, here is what NYU students found:
While in Mexico, students spoke with scholars, workers, activists and government officials. They also interviewed lawyers in Mexico City hired to represent the US before the NAFTA panel, interviewed indigenous people opposed to “maquiladora culture”; and investigated environmental effects of maquiladoras on towns and neighborhoods. Students found evidence of pollution in the Puebla region, including dye-stained rivers and loss of vegetation. In addition, they found that some 90 percent of the workers they interviewed had been left uninformed about the union that represented them, and that conversation between workers is strictly prohibited in most maquiladoras.
And here are the working conditions at these places as the result of NAFTA, which Bill Clinton so ardently worked to bring about:
In April, the students explored working conditions in New York City’s Garment District and Chinatown areas, interviewing sweatshop employees and day workers. They also explored the coalition of American and Mexican human rights organizations and unions that oppose sweatshops and the transnational communities made up of immigrants from Puebla in NYC. Students heard testimonial from day workers that they were paid less than minimum wage; were not allowed to take bathroom breaks during 10-hour days; were made to stand for their entire shift; and worked in stifled premises lacking rudimentary ventilation.
And similar conditions exist in the third world countries in the name of “free trade.”
Unable to work anywhere else, here is how much these workers are paid:
Unconstrained by safety regulations, multinational Maquiladoras suppress labor organization and pay their employees less then $1 per hour.
So, why do they work in these places? They have no choice:
NAFTA has destroyed the economic independence of many indigenous communities in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero. Numerous villages are devastated by government oppression and armed resistence. These rural Mexicans are forced to leave their homelands in hopes of finding jobs in maquiladoras and corporate factory farms along the border.
And women are particularly hard-hit; they are treated as property:
Sexual abuse is endemic. Most garment workers are women, the vast majority of them young women in their teens or twenties who have left their homes for the first time so that they can earn money to send back to their families.
According to Human Rights Watch, in the maquiladoras along the US-Mexico border, factory managers who want to weed out pregnant workers so they can avoid having to pay maternity benefits force women workers to prove they are menstruating, a demeaning procedure that is against Mexican laws. Mandatory pregnancy tests are also common in El Salvador, and women who test positive are fired, also in violation of that country’s laws.
And who are the biggest customers of such factories? Nike, Reebok, the NBA, and Hillary Clinton’s own Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is one of the biggest players in the sweatshop industry. Hillary Clinton served on the board until 1992. But long after she left, the Clintons were developing policies favorable to Wal-Mart, cumulating in the China Agreement in 2000. Bill Clinton’s free trade policies led to Wal-Mart badgering suppliers into moving to China to cut costs. These suppliers opened sweatshops and have repeated the cycle played out in Central America and Mexico.
With a little help from Bill and Hillary Clinton, here are some of the conditions documented at Wal-Mart sweatshops overseas:
Some of the abuses in foreign factories that produce goods for Wal-Mart include:
- Forced overtime
- Locked bathrooms
- Starvation wages
- Pregnancy tests
- Denial of access to health care
- Workers fired and blacklisted if they try to defend their rights
The National Labor Committee reported in September 1999 that the Kathie Lee clothing label (made for Wal-Mart by Caribbean Apparel, Santa Ana, El Salvador) conducted sweatshop conditions of forced overtime. Workers hours were Monday to Friday from 6:50 a.m. to 6:10 p.m., and Saturday from 6:50 a.m. to 5:40 p.m. There are occasional shifts to 9:40 p.m. It is common for the cutting and packing departments to work 20-hour shifts from 6:50 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. Anyone unable or refusing to work the overtime hours will be suspended and fined, and upon repeat “offenses” they will be fired. This factory is in an American Free Trade Zone.
And in some of the worst places, the level of treatment is no better than slavery:
Clothing sewn in China is usually done by young women, 17 to 25 year old (at 25 they are fired as `too old’) forced to work seven days a week, often past midnight for 12 to 28 cents an hour, with no benefits. Or that the women are housed in crowded, dirty dormitories, 15 to a room, and fed a thin rice gruel. The workers are kept under 24-hour-a-day surveillance and can be fired for even discussing factory conditions. The factories in China operate under a veil of secrecy, behind locked metal gates, with no factory names posted and no visitors allowed. China’s authorities do not allow independent human rights, religious or women’s groups to exist, and all attempts to form independent unions have been crushed.
In other words, women are treated like cattle. They cannot love, hang out, talk to each other, have their own lives outside the company, or start a family. If that is not anti-family values, then I want to know what is.
Businessweek exposed another Wal-Mart sweatshop and interviewed a former worker:
Liu quickly realized that the factory was even worse than its reputation. Chun Si, owned by Chun Kwan, a Macau businessman, charged workers $15 a month for food and lodging in a crowded dorm–a crushing sum given the $22 Liu cleared his first month. What’s more, the factory gave Liu an expired temporary-resident permit; and in return, Liu had to hand over his personal identification card. This left him a virtual captive. Only the local police near the factory knew that Chun Si issued expired cards, Liu says, so workers risked arrest if they ventured out of the immediate neighborhood.
HALF A CENT. Liu also found that Chun Si’s 900 workers were locked in the walled factory compound for all but a total of 60 minutes a day for meals. Guards regularly punched and hit workers for talking back to managers or even for walking too fast, he says. And they fined them up to $1 for infractions such as taking too long in the bathroom. Liu left the factory for good in December, after he and about 60 other workers descended on the local labor office to protest Chun Si’s latest offenses: requiring cash payments for dinner and a phony factory it set up to dupe Wal-Mart’s auditors. In his pocket was a total of $6 for three months of 90-hour weeks–an average of about one-half cent an hour. ”Workers there face a life of fines and beating,” says Liu. Chun Kwan couldn’t be reached, but his daughter, Selina Chun, one of the factory managers, says ”this is not true, none of this.” She concedes that Chun Si did not pay overtime but says few other factories do, either. In a face-to-face interview in August, she also admitted that workers have tried to sue Chun Si.
And all of this was aided and abetted by Hillary and Bill.
On the other hand, Russ Feingold has a vision of a global society where if you work hard and play by the rules, you should never have to worry about your job shipping out overseas or losing your life savings to exorbant medical bills. This vision is not just for White middle-class Americans, but for all people regardless of race, nationality, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
Feingold has been a champion of workers rights all his life because he understands what it is like to lose a job and have it go overseas. And this is not just an ivory-tower theory. He has personally intervened to stop Wisconsin factories from shipping out overseas and getting them money so they can keep operating. In the 2004 debate with his opponent Bob Michaels, the latter seemingly used the word “leadership” every other time. But Feingold’s action constituted the highest form of leadership, that of being able to bring opposing sides together and working out solutions.
And I will not take lessons from Hillary supporters who claim that Hillary is “Progressive.” If you’re Progressive, that means you are actively working for the average person anywhere in the world who works hard and plays by the rules. Hillary, on the other hand, works for Wal-Mart and their regressive policies.
