I should also say that as someone who thinks NAFTA was a smart policy and an important-though-oversold policy achievement of Bill Clinton's administration, I find it kind of painful to watch. Hillary Clinton's husband's administration had a perfectly defensible record on trade policy and that is why she defended it in the past -- she ought to keep defending it now. Instead, we get these weird contortions from her and Obama pressing a very dubious line of attack that Clinton won't challenge on the merits.
« Debate Wrapup | Main | Obama's Economic Team »
The NAFTA Thing
27 Feb 2008 12:35 am
Comments (64)
As a fan of Obama, even I hope that this hurts him in Texas.
I completely agree, it's depressing to watch the party backslide. In a way, though, isn't this just the natural consequence of a long primary? Isn't this just Ohio's version of ethanol?
At bottom, their positions on NAFTA and trade agreements in general appear to be the same.
Among a certain number of liberals, it seems to be an article of faith that NAFTA has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. It has pretty much become the favorite scapegoat for any industry that sheds jobs.
Traven, I like your analysis. Most voters develop their beliefs on NAFTA not by looking at the facts but blinding applying their own ideology and life experience to the matter.
But I can't blame Clinton for not defending NAFTA.
She can't start a lecture on comparative advantage.
Hopefully Paul Krugman, the left's longtime defender of free trade, will help her out.
Don't let ole "Soullite" catch wind of you saying that Matt...
Seriously, I agree completely with ya on NAFTA. I''ve been on the Obama bandwagon for a while now, and I've been cringing quite a bit the closer and closer we get to Ohio.
Even Krugman has gone all wobbly on free trade. It seems his NYT gig has made him soft.
Matthew, if a Republican spoke as stupidly as Obama does about NAFTA, you'd make him a subject of ridicule for weeks and months on end.
I would like to add to the dittohead chorus on this one.
How about blogging more on it in the next few weeks and months? It's going to come up in the general election campaign, for sure, cause much is of it is going to be the economy stupid. It would be nice if some viral meme spread was started to get some stronger understanding of the issues involved among voters.
Agree with who ever said that NAFTA is Ohio's ethanol. The problem here is that I think both of them had some good ideas on job creation from the get go, but the closer you get to a showdown in the Rust Belt the more populist you need to be.
It's really unfortunate, because that genie isn't going back in the bottle and I hate to see either of them make promises they can't keep.
It's OK to talk about the problems with NAFTA but one needs to be very careful with their rhetoric here. I'd also say that NAFTA isn't really the issue, Asia is the issue. I'm just a casual observer but I don't see many big competitive advantages for Canada and Mexico's chief export still seems to be labor. It's China's industrial engine that's changing the world.
Just a guess -- none of you are industrial workers who lost your jobs because of NAFTA.
Jobs were moving overseas before NAFTA and still are with NAFTA. Obama was doing his community work in a neighborhood devastated by a loss of manufacturing jobs -- in 1983.
Well if we had used those gains from trade to help out poor workers, we wouldn't be having this problem.
I think the NAFTA thing is just a cold rational calculation by the Obama campaign. Remember that going into Ohio, the media meme has been that Obama's does not have the support of blue-collar Democrats. The Clinton campaign was just waiting to pounce on that. By pre-empting her with NAFTA, Obama was able to change the media narrative and has put her on the defensive ever since - masterstoke! So over the last week of campaigning we have actually been hearing less about Obama's inability to win blue collar workers, and more about NAFTA. Of course the Obama campaign knows it won't hurt them in the general. McCain sure won't bring it up, since at least 50% of the republican base now consists of Huckabee-Buchanan-Tancredo voters among who there is no particular love for NAFTA, or any kind of free trade. So for those Dems who think free trade is generally a good idea, have no fear - politics is just like that. In the general, Obama will head back to the center. After March 4, NAFTA arguments will be behind us.
It's kind of similar to Obama's wide pivot to the left on immigration. It helps him with hispanics in the primamry without hurting him in the general since this is one issue McCain himself cannot use.
You know, the Messiah may just know how to play politics after all! Maybe we have a winner!
Full disclosure: Solid Obama supporter here!
More ditto--everyone's right that it's painful to watch Dems hedge on one of the signal acheivements of the DLC/Clinton agenda, a more sensible approach to trade.
NAFTA has cost some jobs and created others. But the real opportunity that's being missed here is to stand both for Free Trade, and recognizing reality--NAFTA has major flaws that need to be addressed. In my view the biggest on is the loopholes that allow giant agribusiness concerns to dump subsidized corn on the Mexican market, destroying small farmers there and fueling the immigration crisis. If they play it smart, this is a to-fer for Dems--getting something done on jobs AND immigration.
In my view, Obama's mistake here isn't on how to deal with NAFTA. I think he's perfectly right that there need to be better labor and environmental standards (and it seems that Hillary Clinton belatedly agrees.) His mistake was not pivoting over to MFN status for China -- something that is more relevant to the loss of industrial jobs in America and a more unequivocal failing of the Clinton administration on trade. It also was an egregious violation of a campaign pledge by President Clinton.
In my view, Obama's mistake here isn't on how to deal with NAFTA. I think he's perfectly right that there need to be better labor and environmental standards (and it seems that Hillary Clinton belatedly agrees.) His mistake was not pivoting over to MFN status for China -- something that is more relevant to the loss of industrial jobs in America and a more unequivocal failing of the Clinton administration on trade. It also was an egregious violation of a campaign pledge by President Clinton.
NAFTA- aside from the name- has little to do with "free" trade. It's simply a trade regulatory regime. I think NAFTA is often used as shorthand for the broader trade regimes covered under the WTO.
And Chapter 11 of NAFTA has potential serious consequences for state and local governments here in the US.
The gains from these trade regimes are relatively modest, one time improvements in productivity. More people seem to be hurt by them than are helped. And now, even most liberal "free" trade advocates say these trade regimes need to be accompanied by increased social democratic redistribution- but they tend not to insist that the redistribution regimes are passed side by side with the trade regime. It's a shame the way we make artificial distinctions between the economic and the political.
Yeah, this is definitely the low of the Obama campaign. Then again, it is weird to see this be the one issue where Clinton decides not to get technocratic.
Clinton doesn't believe in debating ANYTHING on the merits. It's all tactics. They throw out line after line of attack (Obama's too black, Obama's a plagirist, Obama wore a turbin, hope is false, Obama is inexperienced) and then they ditch them the second they don't gain traction. Why should their domestic policy be any different? Adopt whatever is politically convenient at the time, stick and move.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee may be entertaining politics, but it's no way to run a "national conversation."
Hopefully Paul Krugman, the left's longtime defender of free trade, will help her out.
Even Krugman has gone all wobbly on free trade. It seems his NYT gig has made him soft
I think people misunderstand what Krugman has written about international trade. Krugman never said that free trade was a huge boon to the American economy; in fact, he specifically denied that protectionism would have the devastating economic effects that free trade proponents claimed. What he argued in books like Pop Internationalism was that there was no factual basis for blaming trade for the decline of manufacturing jobs (which was due to gains in productivity) and growing wage inequality (which had much more to do with technology).
It's possible that Krugman's somewhat shifting position on free trade since coming to the New York Times has changed because the facts have changed, in that international trade is contributing much more to wage inequality than it was a decade ago. Even orthodox economics (e.g. the Stolper-Samuelson theorem) predicts that less-skilled workers will lose from free trade.
Also, it should be pointed that Mexico's economic performance has been very dissapointing since NAFTA was launched, although that may be due to other factors.
When I was going through the original NAFTA debate, there were a lot of liberals who liked the ideas they were told the agreement represented, and knew very little about anything of the actual substance.
I.e., they were told it represented increased trade, and somehow represented bringing Mexico and the USA closer together (and occasionally someone would mention Canada). Therefore to the dumb and shallow liberal discussion of the time, to be "against" NAFTA was to be "against" Mexico and Mexicans, and after all there was that angry little Ross Perot guy, so, end of discussion.
(There were a lot of things being said by Mexicans on the subject, especially by the autonomous [not government-controlled] unions, or other civic groups, but they were mostly ignored then as they usually are, replaced by 3 or 4 prominent Mexican commentators who were deemed worthy by the press.)
They were also told that economists (or "economics") proved that it was good, and mostly a lot of people who knew next to zero on the subject adopted that as some sort of revealed truth.
Given that the central fight of the DLC types were to free the party from any whiff or tiny sign that they were captured by those darned hated 'leftists' or ultraliberals or even laborites, this fit in perfectly as a dumb narrative of a smart, chic, Third Way party divorcing itself from the bad past and walking forth into the awesome, new, and better dressed future.
A lot of that has changed, and discussions among liberals occasionally touches on the now available facts which have come out since the agreement's implementation -- i.e., that simply increasing the volume of 'trade' does little for the actual residents of the nations under discussion; or that having a single manufacturer transfer activities from the U.S. to, say, Mexico, or elsewhere, and calling it "trade" doesn't help anyone other than the firm's investors.
But despite the fact agreements like NAFTA contain within them very blunt rules that pretty much no modifications (or of course, the fake "side agreements" that were textually impermissible and unenforceable by the agreement's main chapters) are allowed or fit within its mechanisms, the supporters of the vague notions behind "NAFTA" insist on talking about things like "ways to improve it" and other things that are sort of like fairy dust and waiting for the pretty ponies to appear.
In fact, I don't think Matt thought very much about NAFTA at all at the time of its passage, and this is just another way of saying that those who were intensely involved in the debate originally or since are some sort of weird fringe-y extremists that he's more sane than.
Wow. One often forgets that the netroots is wealthy and aggressively economically centrist, but this thread is a good reminded. Thank god we're not the base.
NAFTA has caused a loss of jobs in America, and the gains from free trade have been realized almost entirely at the top of the income ladder. It has also cut the legs out from under organized labor, which is a big part of the reason why the new wealth has not "trickled down." Wealth only moves down if power exists to force it down, and NAFTA has functioned to diminish the union power that can allow for equitable redistribution. Jobs that have been created in the US have been lower quality than those lost.
In Mexico, the new jobs that have been created have been primarily lower wage, lower (no) benefits, lower (no) safety restrictions and lower (no) environmental protections. It has had disastrous effects on the agricultural economy of Mexico, due to the "freely traded", massively subsidized American corn that has flooded their market, and has replaced those jobs with dangerous, barely-paid, totally unregulated labor in the maquiladores. (Wages in maquiladores about about 50% lower than the wages in other Mexican manufacturing sectors.) The upper tenth of a percentile has seen very large profits, though.
Agreed with El Cid.
It's interesting that, after all the years of netroots media critique, it's still ok to cite no evidence and rip those Damn Dirty Hippies on trade policy. Good to know you're not one of them. Plus ca change...
I watched some of the debate, and I am curious about the specifics that are so objectionable from either Clinton or Obama.
My own mostly uniformed opinion is for unilateral trade agreements coupled with very generous subsidies for the displaced. To me the latter part is what was lacking in NAFTA.
Politically, preemptively giving away the farm on the first part, though, seems politically naïve. An ideal candidate would leverage the benefits of trade (that have mostly gone to the last couple decades biggest winners) to force a deal that provides generous subsidies to improve the lives that have not benefitted. So, what specific position from last night was objectionable?
I should also say that as someone who thinks NAFTA was a smart policy and an important-though-oversold policy achievement of Bill Clinton's administration,
Know what would've been interesting to see after this phrase? An actual defense of NAFTA by Matt Yglesias. Interestingly, though, we don't see one here, and I'm betting we're not going to see one in the future, because Yglesias forms lots of opinions on things he doesn't really know anything about (environmental policy, labor policy, trade policy, gun control policy, etc.) and periodically tosses them at his readers as drive-bys rather than as coherent arguments.
Divguy,
The problem with your analysis is that there are precious few facts to back it up. On the free trade side of the debate, we have a wealth of econometric data demonstrating the gains available from trade. Plus there's theoretical work going back to Basquiat.
Heavy industry does suffer under a free trade regime, but it is a small and shrinking portion of our economy. Moreover, we are now able to purchase steel, automobiles and consumer goods at mcuh lower prices from abroad. This makes us all better off, even displaced manufacturing workers once they settle into a new career. Falling costs are the greatest benefit of free trade, and the greatest argument in its favor.
As an aside, you are absolutely correct that our agricultural policy is reprehensible, but what is needed there is more of the free market, not less. (American corn is only competitive in Mexico because we subsidize the hell out of it. Stop the subsidy, and we'll stop wrecking Mexico's farm economy.)
I agree with the last few threads. At a minimum, MY's post reads like this is so OBVIOUS to anyone who knows anything when, last I heard, trade policy is a hotly debated issue, which is why it came up at a DEBATE! Like DivGuy and the Coach, I would appreciate it if Matt distinguished himself from the denizens of the Village by actually making an argument with supporting facts rather than simply making an assertion with a snide put-down of people who don't agree with it.
There's an argument to be made that NAFTA was half an agreement, and that the other half needs to be fulfilled.
You can also say that 'well, people buy crap from China or Mexican EPZs', but the notion that manufacturing should pay enough to buy the goods you manufacture has gone begging, courtesy of lowest-common-denominator practices.
The problem with your analysis is that there are precious few facts to back it up. On the free trade side of the debate, we have a wealth of econometric data demonstrating the gains available from trade.
This is classic. You lack facts! Now I will make an assertion and back it up with no facts!
I assume you're referring to the Bradford/Grieco/Huffbauer study, which based its meta-analysis on tendentious, if not outright false, estimates of the gains seen from free trade.
See the EPI paper by Josh Bivens on the profound weakness of these estimates, and their uncritical regurgitaiton in the mainstream press.
As an aside, you are absolutely correct that our agricultural policy is reprehensible, but what is needed there is more of the free market, not less.
This is a red herring. We're talking about NAFTA. NAFTA has had precisely the effects I said it had, you agree. Therefore, we both have a problem with NAFTA. Arguing that one possible fix of the problem would come from a particular ideological location in no way speaks to the raw fact that NAFTA has decimated the Mexican agricultural economy and led to a loss of over 1,000,000 jobs.
Heedless's post actually crystallizes the argument quite well, and I'm not being snarky either. Like him, I understand from what I've read that NAFTA does result in some degree of reduced cost with the disadvantage of throwing a not-negligible number of folks in heavy industry out of work. Where I differ from heedless and (sadly) most of the commenters here is that I can't blithely dismiss the latter by saying that "[h]eavy industry does suffer under a free trade regime, but it is a small and shrinking portion of our economy." That's an abstraction, a way of telling displaced workers "too bad, so sad" without coming out and saying so. I guess I'm a little surprised that Democrats and liberals would throw in with this line of argument and trash political candidates who don't toe this line. If nothing else, I thought Democrats were supposed to care about the human costs of our wonderful free market.
Ultimately, Hillary Clinton is answerable to voters. Her future depends on answering to the voters of Ohio. I find it difficult to believe that she's going to attend a debate in Ohio and saying, "I love those policies that hurt you, and hurt you badly. I will talk up the benefits of these policies that you will never see." It's just not going to happen.
To a degree, NAFTA is just a place that the rust belt can focus their unhappiness on: it's a symbol of the decline of manufacturing and a symbol of the "final insult" to labor by the Democratic party, rather than the origin of their problems. However, I can hardly blame them for threatening to punish a politician who stands up and says, "more of our trade policies are the way to go."
On the free trade side of the debate, we have a wealth of econometric data demonstrating the gains available from trade.
What this means is that you take wealth away from a lot of people and give it to some other people. In the end, the total amount of wealth in the system is a net gain. However, nice job making some people a lot worse off in order to make some other people just a bit better off.
If people want more support for free trade treaties, make Ohio's and Michigan's economies better off. If that doesn't happen, then there's always going to be a large political market for opposition to free trade. Everyone complaining that the political culture in the US opposes many of these treaties is just cursing the darkness. I don't see any of you helping revitalize the rust belt.
And, in any case, "free trade treaty" is almost always at this point code for "intellectual property enforcement treaty."
If nothing else, I thought Democrats were supposed to care about the human costs of our wonderful free market.
Well, the left does. The Democratic base does.
The netroots, who are disproportionately wealthy and disconnected from the human costs of free trade and the free market, tend to let their eyes slide over this real human suffering.
And with that, I have lost a lot of respect for you. "Free trade" is a terrible, terrible thing. Watch some Chomsky lectures on "globalization" to get an idea of why.
Have to agree with Divguy and Christmas here. Matt you simply have no clue. It is very depressing to read the comments here as well.
These so called "free trade" agreements (not just NAFTA) are nothing more than a way to get around having to bargain with labor. They are a stick used beat down labor and take away what little fairness workers not so long ago had to fight and die for.
"Free trade" agreements have devastated labor, not just in the US but all over the world (mostly b/c it is practically impossible to organize on global scale - capital has no such problem). As Christmas notes: NO safety for labor that gets paid impossibly low wages with NO environmental protection.
On the free trade side of the debate, we have a wealth of econometric data demonstrating the gains available from trade. Plus there's theoretical work going back to Basquiat.
Bullshit. Dude, no one is arguing that there aren't gains available from true free trade. But this ain't it. Theoretical work and economic models might support such policies but the reality is that these policies have hurt far, far more people than they have have helped (though the people it has helped are powerful and have clearly managed to get others who should know better to believe their bullshit).
Argh.
From Dean Baker:
NAFTA did little to reduce tariff barriers to imports from Mexico. These were already low. What NAFTA was about was removing all the non-tariff barriers that prevented U.S. firms from locating manufacturing operations in Mexico and exporting their output back to the United States. By putting U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in Mexico, NAFTA lowered their wages.
...we could ask hospitals what barriers prevent them from hiring Mexican doctors who would be happy to work for one-half of the wages of their U.S. counterparts. We could do the same for law firms, universities, and even newspapers. We could standardize education and professional standards so that Mexican kids could grow up and work as doctors in Los Angeles or lawyers in New York, just as easily as kids born in Chicago or Boston. This would lead to huge gains to the U.S. economy and greater equality in the United States instead of greater inequality.
But, we didn't... Instead we cut the number of foreign medical residents entering the country in half and changed our licensing procedures to make it harder for foreign doctors to enter the country. Furthermore, it would be illegal for a Wal-Mart University or a Wal-Mart hospital to explicitly hire foreign professors or doctors because they are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. born (or greencard holding) counterparts. Under the law, these institutions must first try to hire U.S. citizens before they can seek out foreign professionals.
If we had the same laws for manufactured goods, Wal-Mart would have to claim that they had tried to find U.S. made shoes or toys (and failed) before they could import these goods from China. Anyone could recognize that this would be protectionist in the case of manufactured goods, why is it so hard to understand that it is protectionist when applied to highly paid professional services.
It's on this issue that we saw the real Obama.
He tells us that Nafta has cost jobs in Ohio and elsewhere in the US.
He tells us he opposes that.
He tells us, when he's in Texas, that the US needs to get serious about helping Mexico create jobs, to help stem the tide of immigrants.
That's what he favors.
So, as with his stance on carbon and gas prices, he's simply ignoring the law of noncontradiction.
He's a liar. We've had this kind of candidate before.
NAFTA has been good for the rich, certainly, in the US and Mexico. It's been good for the type of people who write for the Atlantic, most probably. But it has been a disaster for the Mexican peasantry.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1204-02.htm
NAFTA has benefited the rich and the propertied classes in both countries at the expense of labor, peasants and the poor. It's a disgrace that anyone in the Democratic party supports it.
DivGuy wins this thread.
I am inclined to agree that NAFTA and free trade are good things.
But it's not a wildly stupid empirical claim that there are winners and losers from NAFTA, and that the losers are concentrated in particular geographical areas and economic classes.
Is it true or false?
I don't see any pro-NAFTA data anywhere in this thread, just the assertion that anti-NAFTA = poopypants.
He tells us that Nafta has cost jobs in Ohio and elsewhere in the US.
He tells us, when he's in Texas, that the US needs to get serious about helping Mexico create jobs, to help stem the tide of immigrants.
This use of "jobs" to refer both to sustainable agricultural labor within a viable, vibrant community, and to dangerous maquiladora labor in newly-created factory towns with few benefits and far lower pay than other manufacturing jobs, is the sleight-of-hand that produces these fake contradictions.
The Mexican people have seen very few gains from free trade due to the "race to the bottom" that has produced low-quality jobs and benefited almost exclusively the wealthiest percentile.
What is needed, in all these cases, is a functioning labor movement paired to regulation on economic right, human rights and environmental protection. As Baker has shown, NAFTA functioned precisely to undercut possible sources of labor power and to enrich those who were already wealthy.
NAFTA isn't the problem. It's China and others that are the problem. Mexico is pretty small potatoes compared to the impact of hundreds of millions of people entering the global workforce in virtually unregulated sweatshops in Asia.
Scottreads,
I thought I was pretty explicit in my callousness, but clearly not, so I will go all in:
To the degree that heavy industry has been a source of "good" jobs in the past 30 years, those jobs have been supported by protectionism, government subsidy, and state sponsored cartellization. We (that is, the 90% of Americans who don't work in agriculture, Big 3 auto manufacturing, steel production, etc.) have historically been forced by our own government to support those sectors' wages through higher prices and the acceptance of little innovation and poor quality goods.
Now that Washington is (slowly) ceasing to prop up these inefficient companies, their employees are suffering. I'm not thrilled with that, but I consider the gains to the rest of us in lowered costs and greater productivity to be well worth the cost.
Divguy,
As I said, I agree with you that NAFTA has some serious flaws. but when Hillary or Obama use the acronym as an epithet, they are not speaking of its effect on mexican farmers. The rustbelt's nostalgia for protectionism (which I believe you share) has the potential to do great harm to our country, and I wish I could see some way to keep that sentiment out of Washington.
I'm actually not all that familiar with the data on NAFTA, and what I do know about the Bradford paper suggests that it rests on pretty shaky empirical grounds. I was speaking of the data on trade's tight link to prosperity more generally, which encompasses pretty much the entire body of research on the subject. I'll return to that in a moment (assuming you're still interested) but this post is too long as it is.
I'll bet that a lot of people who have discussed NAFTA are also aware of China.
Every damned promise of the free traders was a lie. Our economy is destroyed. Young people today can't get jobs that pay 1/2 what they paid 30 years ago. Serive and construction jobs suffer massive competition from illegal immigration brought on by NAFTA's disastrous agricultural scheme. They jobs we lost, that paid 15 an hour and came with great benefits, were replaced by Mcjobs that pay 9 an hour and have next to no benefits.
But keep telling yourselves that Americans hate NAFTA because they are stupid. Keep telling yourselves that you're not letting your economic status bias you as to what is 'good for America'. What is good for you is bad for America, and you all have to stop pretending otherwise. It's the single most unpopular act that has passed through congress in the last 100 years. That should really tell you something.
I was speaking of the data on trade's tight link to prosperity more generally
Well, then, let's just ignore the actual facts of the actual effects of NAFTA. There are "general" findings that trump empirical reality!
As I said, I agree with you that NAFTA has some serious flaws. but when Hillary or Obama use the acronym as an epithet, they are not speaking of its effect on mexican farmers.
Right, they're talking about the fact that NAFTA has massively weakened labor power in America, caused a loss of good jobs and an increase in bad jobs. Luckily for you, this only happened at the level of people's actual lives, so we can waive it away. There are general, theoretical findings to be discussed!
heedless-
Here's the snark-removed version of my response.
If you are going to bring in general/theoretical findings on trade, you need to further argue exactly how those findings are applicable to NAFTA, and grapple with the actual effects of NAFTA.
If the effects of NAFTA are not the effects projected by the general study, then that raises questions about the general study, or about its applicability.
Most Americans don't even have strong ideological beliefs. The idea that they form their opinions based on them is moronic, and indicates someone who has never actually studied political science.
Americans, like everyone else, primarily form their judgments based on personal experience. But that's really besides the point. The point is that in a Democracy, you all think you should just be able to say 'fuck the public, we know what's best'. That's a problem with all of you, not with me. You're the ones that don't really believe in Democracy. You don't even believe in Republics, as you're here insulting the peoples representatives for bad-mouthing trade deals that hover around the 30% approval rate. no, you believe entirely in a government that enriches you by stealing money from people who have less than you.
And you guys wonder why everyone else in the party hates you and calls you Republican-lite.
I don't get the NAFTA love from people on here who call themselves Democrats or Progressives. Did NAFTA lead to lower prices? Sure, but at what cost? Bill Clinton was/is a DLC guy. What is the big thing with the DLC? Having closer ties with the titans of big business. That's not necessarily a good thing for labor. I thought the Democrats were supposed to be the party of the little people/looking out for the little guy. What happened to that? Have we turned a blind eye to labor? Judging from some comments here I'd say so. Could labor do some smarter things? Sure they could. Don't let big business of the hook either though. Why do you think people in Ohio hate NAFTA? Are you calling them all irrational?
This use of "jobs" to refer both to sustainable agricultural labor within a viable, vibrant community, and to dangerous maquiladora labor in newly-created factory towns with few benefits and far lower pay than other manufacturing jobs, is the sleight-of-hand that produces these fake contradictions.
The real sleight-of-hand is to pretend that this was the choice faced by the Mexican peasants who moved into the manufacturing sector.
"Sustainable agricultural labor within a viable, vibrant community", for those of you who got lost in the polysyllables, means "dirt-poor subsistence farmers". Dressing it up in bucolic ecobabble won't make their lives any more pleasant. These are people who were offered a choice, and like their bretheren in China, they decided that the bottom of the manufacturing shitpile was better than the "viable, vigrant community" where they worker before.
Manufacturing jobs in devloping countries are badly paid, low-status, and frequently dangerous. Most peasants still prefer them to farming.
Rereading this, it's clear that Matt isn't just a stuck up elitist, he's a god damned moron unfit to offer political advice to anyone on this planet.
Only a moron would suggest you defend NAFTA in Ohio. You may as well go to Disney World with a sign that says 'Pedo 4 Life' and try to get votes there. Even if you think it's the 'right policy', this is the most idiotic thing Clinton could ever do.
heedless, keep in mind that one of the reasons here is that farming became undercut by imports from the US, which were themselves backed by american farm subsidies. That was one of the effects of NAFTA, and that is usually a goal of many free trade agreements.
People keep focusing on how free trade agreements make it easier for Americans to have access to cheap stuff. That's not even the main benefit to the US or why it pursues these treaties: the reasons are so that US agriculture has more outlets for which is can sell their surpluses and so that large companies are more able to enforce any supposed violations of their intellectual property claims.
These are people who were offered a choice
No, they weren't! You just agreed with me an hour ago that the flooding of the Mexican market with American farm products played a big role in the destruction of the Mexican agricultural sector. They were forced out of their jobs by the bottom falling out of the market, which was caused by NAFTA.
People's lives suck in a lot of ways. I acknowledge and apologize for my false rhetoric on agricultural work - it was hardly a non-sucky life for most poor Mexican workers. But until evidence appears of real improvements in the lives of Mexican workers - which we really do not have - I see little reason to think that there was some Dubner-esque "natural experiment" that showed the preference of workers for the jobs created by NAFTA.
DivGuy,
No need to spare the snark. I like the snark. Besides, if you are going to get all reasonable, I'm going to need to feel guilty about my last post.
And you're right, I have not done a good job of arguing for the benefits of NAFTA. Mostly because I don't know of any well executed studies that support that position. So I'm forced to plead no contest.
A good portion of our disagreement seems to stem from a deeper question of what (in the morass of statistics we use to try to understand our country's economy) is important, and what is not.
In snarkier terms, we disagree about what constitutes a "good" job, and about whether the benefits of free trade are the only ones effecting "people's actual lives" (my position, sort of) or whether we really should be paying more attention to the downsides.
As a parting shot, because I just can't help myself: Given that the general case for free trade is very strong (I think you agree, but if I'm wrong, please correct me), shouldn't the burden be on those opposing NAFTA to demonstrate that it is an exception?
I think you've made a solid case (I might even have changed my mind, slightly) and it's been a pleasure debating you.
Cheers.
Given that the general case for free trade is very strong (I think you agree, but if I'm wrong, please correct me), shouldn't the burden be on those opposing NAFTA to demonstrate that it is an exception?
I think that "free trade" is a chimera, encompassing a wide variety of agreements signed between a wide variety of states. We need to view different agreements based on their effects - empirical work has to be the determining factor.
My general position - though it is again based on a chimera and should always be tested against actual facts in empirical study - is that "free trade", when not paired to powerful measures to protect workers' power, is a bad thing. NAFTA, as Baker's work shows, was not only not paired with the protection of workers, but actually functioned precisely to undercut labor unions and enrich the wealthiest.
It is a rather hasty assumption that NAFTA led to such an increased manufacturing sector that people were able to choose to abandon farming the ejidos for better jobs in factories.
Between 1991 and 1998, the share of workers in salaried1 jobs with benefits fell sharply in Mexico. The compensation of the remaining self-employed workers, who include unpaid family workers as well as small business owners, was well above those of the salaried sector in 1991. By 1998, the incomes of salaried workers had fallen 25%, while those of the self-employed had declined 40%. At that point, the average income of the self-employed was substantially lower than that of the salaried labor force. This reflects the growth of low-income employment such as street vending and unpaid family work (for example, in shops and restaurants). After seven years, NAFTA has not delivered the promised benefits to workers in Mexico, and few if any of the agreement's stated goals has been attained.
Yes, there are those who like to discuss the issue with a grand scale neo-transformative rhetoric about a particular agreement finally liberating the peasantry -- or, conversely, there were neo-Marxist scholars and policymakers who thought it was a good idea to drive the peasants off their land.
Similarly, the growth in employment in a maquiladora area is not logically connected to the preservation of labor elsewhere, so a net transfer of jobs from one employer to another is not exactly a measure of 'improvement'.
The decline in real wages and the lack of access to stable, well-paid jobs are critical problems confronting Mexico's workforce. While NAFTA has benefited a few sectors of the economy, mostly maquiladora industries and the very wealthy, it has also increased inequality and reduced incomes and job quality for the vast majority of workers in Mexico. In many ways (such as the stagnation of the manufacturing share of employment), the entire process of development has been halted, and in some cases it even may have been reversed. NAFTA has created some of the most important challenges for Mexico's development in the 21st century. The question that remains is whether Mexico can, under NAFTA, restart its stalled development and find a way to redistribute the benefits of the resulting growth.
Given that the general case for free trade is very strong (I think you agree, but if I'm wrong, please correct me), shouldn't the burden be on those opposing NAFTA to demonstrate that it is an exception?
You mean the general case that no country in mankind's history has even industrialized under a free trade regime?
Tyro,
You're right. NAFTA's agreements on agriculture are (collectively) an offense against all that is decent and right, as is most of the US's farm policy. ADM's main crop is congressmen, and they keep them well fertilized.
That said, I don't think the plight of Mexican farmers has anything to do with why NAFTA bashing gets you votes in Ohio.
Heedless,
Do you actually know any Third World peasants? I know quite a few. And after having seen both urban and rural poverty, I would not have encouraged _any_ of the people that I worked with to sell their land, or move to the city.
The condition of Mexican farmers was not all terrible, compared to that of most people in the rest of Latin America, between the 1930s and 1980s. In much of Mexico the peasants actually exerted a certain degree of control over their land, under the system of cooperative farms (ejidos) that was set up in the aftermath of the Revolution. As part of the free trade agreements of course, Mexico's government dismantled the collectives and abandoned Mexico's peasants to the tender mercies of capitalism. I suspect that what most Latin American peasants is a better standard of living _in their rural communities_. More schools and clinics, a new bicycle, individual or collective control over their land, freedom from the power of the patron. What they don't want is to move to the cities and have to beg the patron for a job, and not to have _any_ land or control over one's livelihood.
Look at some of the anthropological studies of shantytown people in Latin America. One of the commonest things is that 'things were better off in the country' and that it was a mistake to leave. Of course, once you sell your land to the Furies of capitalism, one can't easily get it back.
Industrialization and urbanization rarely happened by popular consent. Not in Britain in the 1500s, not in France in the 1700s, not in Russia in the 1800s, not in Brazil in the 1900s, and not in India or Mexico today. Latin America is only going to achieve a truly just and humane path to development if a commitment is made to investing in rural development, in real land redistribution, in sustainable agriculture and in repopulating the countryside.
What I find dismaying about the candidates' NAFTA obsession is that it seems so out of proportion. A larger solution to the economic problems of the US is required than the modification of NAFDA.
It reminds me of Bush's "tax cuts solve everything" mantra. Now the mantra is "NAFDA is the root of all evil."
Is that really the answer -- change NAFDA and we're ok? I don't think so.
wasnt roger and me made 5 years before NAFTA was enacted?
the biggest effect NAFTA has had on anything was it supplied an acronym that can be blamed for everything bad thats happened to this country's manufacturing base, even the stuff that was happening for decades before it even existed. but go ahead, act like if NAFTA wasnt passed anything would be any different at all today regarding jobs in america.
Of course NAFTA is not all bad. Like any treaty, there are winners and losers. The numbers just happen to show that the U.S. is not winning. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. net manufacturing employment declined by 3,654,000 jobs from 1994 to 2007. NAFTA was signed in November of 2006. It's no coincidence that during this same time period the U.S. automotive industry has shifted the production of several car lines north and south of the border. If you care, or pay attention, you'll notice that just about everything you purchase these days is made outside of this country. Sure, a lot of jobs were leaving before NAFTA, but NAFTA and fee trade status with China have certainly exascerbated and accelerated the problem. (I don't know if the Bush administrations classification of burger flipping as a manufacturing job is reflected in these numbers, so it could be worse)
It's clear why American companies move out of the country or shut down. They can't compete against 1.50 an hour labor. American companies also have to abide by pesky environmental laws, like not being able to dump their raw sewage into the waterways. And unlike China, we don't have the luxery to use slave and child labor.
The backers of NAFTA use to say we'll see some low skill jobs leave the country, but these will be offset by higher paying jobs. Well guess what, there aren't enough high skill jobs to go around. And even the high skill jobs are starting to leave. The sky might not be falling but lets not say the sky is green when its obviously blue.
Now the mantra is "NAFDA is the root of all evil."
I have nothing against the National Association of Future Doctors of Audiology. However I have not made my mind up about the North American Field Development Association or about NAFDA Australian Foodservice Distribution. Surely none of them should really be considered the root of all evil.
Comments closed March 12, 2008.
| 
Heads in the Sand
There are only three facts regarding NAFTA. One: some people (mostly on the left) contend it has cost American workers' jobs. Two: some people (mostly on the left) contend it has cost Mexican workers' jobs. Three: trade between the US and Mexico has exploded since its implementation. It is difficult to believe that all three of these things can be true at the same time, though I suppose it is remotely possible.
Posted by Traven | February 27, 2008 12:51 AM