Maytag workers in Galesburg, IL rally to protest the closing of their
profitable plant. The work is going to notoriously anti-union Reynosa,
Mexico. The workers demanded that Maytag CEO Ralph Hake resign
and the jobs stay in the U.S.

 
The nation's trade deficit, the amount of goods produced overseas and imported into the U.S., reached $435.2 billion last year.

That record deficit, fueled by bad trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) indicates that North America's top export is good-paying jobs, not products.

"The combination of record trade deficits and the highest U.S. unemployment levels in two decades is no coincidence," said IAM President Tom Buffenbarger. "The catalysts for these twin disasters are the so-called free trade agreements, negotiated in secret by and for transnational corporations."

North American consumers are buying the same products from the same big corporations, but the factories and jobs went to other countries.

Thousands of IAM members and their communities suffer as companies like Eureka, Maytag, Stanley Works and other household names move profitable manufacturing operations to low-wage factories in China and Mexico.

Now those same "free traders" want to extend NAFTA to the whole Western Hemisphere. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is being hammered out in a series of meetings by trade ministers. The final agreement is scheduled for completion in 2005.

Promoters are dusting off the same hollow promises of more jobs and prosperity, but working families throughout the hemisphere aren't buying it this time.

The FTAA meetings in Quito, Ecuador and Quebec, Canada saw massive citizen protests. The next FTAA meeting is in Miami, FL in November. Groups across North America are mobilizing to demand that labor and environmental protections be part of the core agreement.

"Over it's 10-year history, NAFTA cost workers in the United States more than 700,000 jobs. Promised new markets have not appeared. The small trade surplus the U.S. had with Mexico has ballooned into a $30 billion annual deficit," said Buffenbarger. "Extending this failed model to the entire hemisphere with FTAA will be a disaster for working families.

"We need a new trade policy, one based on vision, fairness and democracy. Workers in the U.S.-together with all the workers in the Americas-deserve no less," Buffenbarger declared.

Global trade agreements must recognize core labor standards as central trade issues. In NAFTA and the proposed FTAA, labor and environmental protections are relegated to unenforceable side agreements.

"Corporate America faces few obstacles in the export of our jobs, capital and technology to low-wage developing countries. Those nations often viciously suppress any attempts to form a free trade union movement," Buffenbarger emphasized.

Without enforceable labor standards such as the right to join unions or prohibitions against child labor, corporations can plunder labor markets in any country. It's a race to the bottom that no worker can win.