CONTRIBUTORS

Opinion: Where we need to go with NAFTA

Bill Pascrell, Jr.
U.S. Representative Bill Pascrell, Jr. (N.J.-09)

As Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee, I traveled to Montreal last month to take part in the ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiation. I met with Canadian, Mexican, and American business leaders and workers, all of whom expressed anxiety about the direction of talks.

The consequences for redrawing NAFTA poorly would be devastating for our economy and for current and future generations of Americans. Yet as we enter a pivotal phase of discussions, Trump administration negotiators are focused on the wrong issues and fighting the wrong fights.

I’ve been as critical of U.S. trade policy as just about anyone in Congress. And I’ve had good reason.

My hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, was our nation’s first planned industrial city. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Paterson produced so many textiles that it was christened the “Silk City.”

While we still wear the moniker with pride, silk is no longer spun in Paterson. Paterson’s days as a manufacturing powerhouse have faded. As it is with all profound changes, there are many reasons for this decline, but principal among them is increased labor competition -- first from the American South, then, with facilitation from our own policies, from beyond our borders.

U.S. trade policy has been designed to suck jobs and investment away from places like Paterson. Our defective approach to trade, shared by both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, has placed the desires of big corporations ahead of the needs of regular working people.

A son of the Silk City, I have every reason to detest NAFTA.

Yet because of its scope and the relationships it has forged, NAFTA has become arguably the single most consequential trade agreement for the U.S. economy, inextricably intertwining our three countries. So I bristle at the ham-fisted threats emanating from this White House about tearing up NAFTA in a fit of pique. Such talk directed against our closest partners is incendiary and dangerous.

Today, we have a one-time opportunity to remake NAFTA to our advantage and we should not squander it on the altar of the President’s recklessness.

Now 24 years old, the social and economic world NAFTA was written for was vastly different than the one we now inhabit. When NAFTA was first negotiated, the Internet had barely been conceived. Banking was done almost entirely in person. The most popular mobile communications device was not the cell phone, but the reliable pager.

A new NAFTA must create rules for the economic activity that takes place today, while anticipating how our economy will evolve in the future. This will entail much more than mere modernization of the agreement if we are to succeed in protecting the American worker.

When NAFTA was first debated in Congress, it encountered significant resistance among Democrats because our party feared that the agreement would build an integrated North American economy on the backs of exploited workers. 

And these fears have been borne out over the past two decades. As productivity has risen for Mexico’s industrial workers, their wages have remained stagnant and their basic rights and protections -- particularly their right to collectively bargain -- have been repeatedly squelched.

Throughout NAFTA’s lifetime, we have helped foster a broken system for workers in Mexico. This willful blindness matters because it is a direct cause of the downward wage pressures that have ravaged our old industrial centers: cities like Youngstown, Ohio; Flint, Michigan; and my own Paterson, New Jersey.

We have allowed a quarter century of U.S. workers to be threatened that their jobs will be moved to Mexico if they don’t agree to terms more favorable to management. Countless working families have faced pay and benefit cuts and our once-robust organized labor system has been enfeebled. In the name of corporate profits, we tolerated that NAFTA was failing our workers.

As populist waves have washed over our shores and Americans of all stripes have declared themselves fed up at the American worker getting the short shrift, the status quo is untenable. Changes must be made.

Greenpeace and other activists, wearing Donald Trump masks and carrying signs that read in Spanish "Racism is not commerce," protest against the seventh round of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, renegotiations, in front of the foreign relations office in Mexico City, Tuesday, Feb. 27.

I take heart that Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative, says he is dedicated to trying to “re-balance” NAFTA. 

But while I hear the Ambassador and his lieutenants talk about their prescriptions on auto rules, investment arbitration, and sunset provisions, we need to see concrete ideas that will deal with the restraining of Mexican workers’ rights and wages. Without such proposals, we cannot begin to address the suppression of American workers’ wages and opportunities.

If the goal in the NAFTA talks is the re-balancing of the pact in favor of American workers, especially our workers in industrial manufacturing, the administration’s focus must be on elevating Mexican workers’ rights. By devoting ourselves to growing a more vibrant middle class of consumers in Mexico, consumers that will be able to buy goods made in the United States by American workers, we can benefit Americans and Mexico’s underclass. A rising tide will lift all boats.

Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution is clear that the Congress has power over international trade. Effective negotiations require a partnership between the congressional and executive branches of our government -- we must work together on the issues that define our trade alliances. In the NAFTA re-negotiation, too much is at stake for our workers, our economy, our neighbors, and our future.

Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, represents the 9th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.