Borderline Jobs In Mexico Replace U.S. Workers by Robert E. Swift (NAPSA)—“U:S. Is Told to Let Mexican Trucks Enter,” said a headline in The Wall Street Jour- nal. The article tells of a North American Free Trade Agreement case the United States just lost when a five member arbitration panel ruled that Mexican trucks should be allowed on U.S. roads or we would face a penalty that could reach up to $2 billion a year. @ North, to America, to solve his country’s problems. He wants free and unfettered passage for Mexico’s decrepit fleet of trucks; he wants unchallenged and unlimited travel to America for his citizens, and he wants the U.S. to declare all the illegal Mexican immigrants permanent residents. In other words, he wants a “merger” of sorts. As in many such actions taken This issue has been simmering since 1995, when our previous at the corporate level, mergers produce layoffs, as companies seek of our roads because they were squeeze cost out of the new and larger enterprise. The same is NAFTAinitiative per se, that is eliminated; American workers are being laid off everyday, while new jobs are created across the border. Certainly Mexico’s president, Administration refused to allow Mexican trucks unrestricted use believed to be unsafe and did not meet U.S. standards including pollution. But it reveals a deeper issue, about the advisability of the really on the table for the current Administration. The Mexican economy is dominated by three incomesources: oil, agriculture and U.S. manufactur- ing. In the latter instance, Mexico has established a manufacturing infrastructure along its northern border expressly to take on as- signments from U.S. companies that find the wage structure in Mexico more to their liking. After all, why pay U.S. scale when you can get away with paying virtually slave wages to workersin this Third World country? Tens of thousands of Mexican citizens are now employedin these maquiladoras, as they’re called, while tens of thousands of Ameri- can workers are now unemployed as a direct consequence. In the 1960's, with U.S. support, many of these factories started to go up along the border as a step towards easing the chronic unemployment in Mexico. Then, with the passing of NAFTA, came even more jobs and the rapid growth of shantytowns such as Ciudad Juarez, whose citizens live in squalid conditions, without running water or sanitary facilities, all that is affordable in exchange for the minimum wageof four dollars a day. Mexico’s new president, Vicente Fox, wants to improve thelot of his people. But to do so he looks only to eliminate redundancies to occurring here. Our jobs are being ambitious for his citizens and their welfare, cannot be faulted for trying to span the distance between poverty and middle income. But that gap reaches into the United States, and includes wresting away domestic jobs by undercutting our wages. Our Administration must pri- marily look to the well-being of American citizens. And it must consider the consequences of trade initiatives on the lives of workers whoall at once find themselves in a struggle for economic survival not as a result of shoddy work or a shrinking market, but simply because he or she resides in a country whose standard of living, admired by the rest of the world, becomes a disadvantage when cheap labor, no matter how cruel a lifestyle such low wages afford, becomes a valuable commodity to companies willing to subsidize these conditions in exchange for short-term profit gain. For facts on helping our economy by buying items made in America, write to the Crafted With Pride in the U.S.A. Council at 1045 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10018; or call at 212-819-4397 or fax 212-819-4493. Robert E. Swift is executive director of the Crafted with Pride in U.S.A. Council, headquartered in New York City.
