Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
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NAFTA Renegotiation:
Will Working People Continue to Get Shafted?
with
Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
and
Gisela Perez, lawyer and journalist who works at NGO Derechos
Digitales and is a spokesperson of the coalition "Mexico Against
NAFTA", composed of more than 30 civil society organizations
and trade unions.
The trade policies that replace NAFTA cannot be allowed to put the
interests of multinational corporations first, as the renegotiation of
NAFTA under a Trump administration teeming with corporate interests
is positioned to do. We need an internationalist approach to trade that
lifts up labor rights, environmental standards, and human rights for
people in all of the nations involved in the agreement, and provides
good jobs for workers in the U.S. Trump wants to allow corporations
to pit U.S. workers against other working communities in a global race
to the bottom.
To coincide with the first day of NAFTA renegotiations, Mexican civil
society organizations, including the largest independent trade unions,
small farmer and other civic and human rights organizations, mobilized
nearly 9,000 people to march through the streets of Mexico City to their
Foreign Ministry with hundreds of banners and signs that read “NAFTA
Injures You – Mexico is better without FTAs (Free Trade Agreements)”.
Contrary to President Trump’s claims that Mexico has been the big
winner under NAFTA, the dozens of Mexican civil society organizations
that organized the march assert that the current NAFTA model has been
a failure for the majority of Mexicans and that they reject any deepening
of that model through NAFTA renegotiations. They blasted the secrecy
of the negotiating process and delivered a list of demands to the
Mexican government.
Lori Wallach says: “A new NAFTA deal that we can support is a deal
that not only stops NAFTA’s ongoing damage, but that creates American
jobs and raises wages. Unless NAFTA’s investor privileges that promote
job offshoring are eliminated and strong, enforceable labor and
environmental standards and tighter rules of origin are added, a new
deal will not be better for working people, much less deliver on Trump’s
promises to bring down the NAFTA trade deficit or create more American
manufacturing jobs. NAFTA must be renegotiated to stop its ongoing
damage. But depending on how the administration conducts these talks,
NAFTA could get worse for working people in all three NAFTA countries. “
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