NAFTA at 20
By The AFL-CIO has produced a report on the impacts of NAFTA 20 years after passage. Although the impacts are probably familiar to you, it’s worth a read anyway. The summary:
It’s a flawed model that promotes the economic interests of a very few and at the expense of workers, consumers, farmers, communities, the environment and even democracy itself.
While the overall volume of trade within North America due to NAFTA has increased and corporate profits have skyrocketed, wages have remained stagnant in all three countries.
Productivity has increased, but workers’ share of these gains has decreased steadily, along with unionization rates.
NAFTA pushed small Mexican farmers off their lands, increasing the flow of desperate undocumented migrants.
It exacerbated inequality in all three countries.
And the NAFTA labor side agreement has failed to accomplish its most basic mandate: to ensure compliance with fundamental labor rights and enforcement of national labor laws.
The only answer is to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership so this can all just get worse.