Get ready for the Free Trade Area of the Americas - a NAFTA-style trade zone from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Patagonia, Argentina.

“NAFTA was the starting point. Corporations want to expand it to every country in the Western hemisphere, said IAM President Tom Buffenbarger. “They say it will create jobs. Tell that to the 400,000 U.S. workers whose jobs disappeared after NAFTA.”

In 1994, leaders from 34 counties at the first “Summit of the Americas” meeting agreed to implement the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005. In 1998 and again in 2001, those leaders met again to set the overall direction for the FTAA.

In between the summit meetings, nine negotiating groups and trade ministers work out key details of the final agreement. They deal strictly with corporate issues such as market access, agriculture, investment or intellectual property rights. Labor and environmental issues are relegated non-negotiating groups that can only “advise” the negotiators.

“Under their rules,” said Buffenbarger, “You can take more action against someone bootlegging a compact disk than someone running a sweatshop with child labor. We should scrap FTAA until labor and community standards have equal standing as corporate rights.”

Making More
Without enforceable labor standards, corporations can scour the hemisphere for countries willing to drive down wages to attract foreign investment. It’s a system that harms workers at both ends. North America loses good-paying jobs to countries that keep their workers at poverty levels.

“We were shocked when they moved our plant to Mexico,” said Diane Scheel, a  34-year employee of Eureka Vacuum Company. The IAM signed its first contract with Eureka in 1937. Things changed when the multi-national firm AB Electrolux bought Eureka.

“Our plant was making money. They told us we were great employees,” said Scheel.

“But the new owners had no roots in the community. We did everything we could to get them to stay. Electrolux admitted they weren’t losing money here, but they could make even more in Mexico.”

Hurting Communities
NAFTA-style trade agreements also give corporations the power to overturn local, state and federal laws that protect citizens. Mexico used a NAFTA trade panel to force the U.S. to open the entire country to trucks from Mexico, despite evidence that they were unsafe.

When the Canadian government banned the gasoline additive MMT based on evidence that it was unsafe, the manufacturer used NAFTA’s investor protections to force the Canadian government to say that MMT is safe and pay a $13 million settlement.

Stopping FTAA
In the U.S., very little will happen with FTAA until Congress approves “fast track” authority to negotiate an agreement. Stopping a fast track vote in Congress would deal a crippling blow to the entire FTAA process.

“In the end, these trade agreements mean the destruction of the middle class,” said Scheel. “I started at Eureka straight out of high school. Many of us had parents and grandparents that worked there and raised families. The factory jobs were our ticket to the middle class. It’s a door for our kids that’s being closed.”

(below) A worker in a Levi-Strauss plant in Bogota, Colombia. Under FTAA, it will be even easier for corporations to set up shop in South America.

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