The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“NAFTA” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S14099-S14100 on Sept. 21, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
NAFTA
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, during the Senate debate over the North American Free-Trade Agreement I put together a brochure entitled
``NAFTA MATH: It Doesn't Add Up.'' This brochure questioned the job creation claims of NAFTA proponents and showed those job claims to be a distortion of what would really happen under NAFTA.
In the brochure and during the NAFTA debate I pointed out that the job gain claims were based solely on expected increases in exports. These job creation claims totally ignored any potential and expected increase in imports from Mexico--which result in the loss of American jobs.
An op-ed published in Monday's New York Times confirms the worst of my fears. I will ask to have printed in the Record a September 11 New York Times op-ed by Bob Herbert which confirms the fact that NAFTA has not resulted in the increase in U.S. jobs promised by its supporters. In fact, it has resulted in the opposite.
Mr. Herbert writes about the findings of a Public Citizen study of U.S. jobs created under NAFTA. Public Citizen looked at the job creation promises of dozens of companies that supported NAFTA. Mr. Herbert writes, ``Public Citizen noted that every one of those companies has already `laid off workers because of NAFTA.' '' In addition, ``Of the companies surveyed, 89 percent had failed to take any significant step toward fulfilling their promises of job creation or export expansion.''
In addition, ``There has been no meaningful job creation from NAFTA, which has been in effect for 20 months. But the U.S. Department of Labor, through its NAFTA Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, which was designed to help people thrown out of their jobs by NAFTA, has certified that 38,148 workers lost their jobs by mid-August. An additional 30,000 workers have filed for assistance under the program. It is expected that the true job loss under NAFTA will reach 1 million by the end of the year.''
Finally, Mr. Herbert writes that although exports from the United States have increased to Mexico as NAFTA proponents predicted, as I feared, imports to the United States from Mexico increased even faster, especially for high value-added manufactures such as automobiles and other high-technology items.
Unfortunately, some of our fears about the implications of NAFTA were well founded. NAFTA's problems were evident even before the devaluation of the peso which hurt hopes for a growing consumer market in Mexico. With Mexico's current fiscal problems, these trends could well get worse.
I ask that the op-ed by Bob Herbert be printed in the Record.
The material follows:
NAFTA's Bubble Bursts
(By Bob Herbert)
Back in 1993, in a typical declaration of faith in the projected glories of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a vice president of the Mattel Corporation named Fermin Cuza assured a Congressional subcommittee that Nafta would result in the creation of new jobs at Mattel and have ``a very positive effect'' on the 2,000 men and women already employed by Mattel in the United States.
Mr. Cuza's was just one of many promises made during that season of devotion to free trade. The consumer group Public Citizen took a look back at them.
Let's start with Mattel. Not only have no jobs been created, but a check of Federal records by Public Citizen found that 520 workers at Mattel's Fisher-Price facility in Medina, N.Y., have been certified as laid off specifically because of ``increased company imports from Mexico'' that resulted from Nafta.
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch unit surveyed the job creation promises of dozens of staunchly pro-Nafta corporations. They included, in addition to Mattel, Allied Signal, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, Scott Paper and Zenith.
In a report released last week, Public Citizen noted that every one of those companies has already ``laid off workers because of Nafta.''
Of the companies surveyed, 89 percent had failed to take any significant step toward fulfilling their promises of job creation or export expansion.
In November 1993, President Clinton asserted, ``If this trade agreement passes--Nafta--we estimate America will add another 200,000 jobs by 1995 alone.''
He was mistaken. There has been no meaningful job creation from Nafta, which has been in effect for 20 months. But the U.S. Department of Labor, through its Nafta Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which was designed to help people thrown out of their jobs by Nafta, has certified that 38,148 workers lost their jobs by mid-August. An additional 30,000 workers have filed for assistance under the program, which is not well known and not available to most workers who are at risk. It is expected that the true job loss under Nafta will reach one million by the end of the year.
It is fashionable now for Nafta supporters to blame the end-of-the-year peso crash for problems that were inherent in the trade agreement. During the first year of Nafta, before the big devaluation in December, the value of the peso relative to the dollar had already declined by nearly 15 percent. That wiped out any advantage the U.S. would have realized from Nafta's lower tariffs. The average tariff decline was just 10 percent. In other words, the ``market access advantage'' that the U.S. was supposed to enjoy had vanished before the peso crash.
Proponents of Nafta are quick to note that U.S. exports to Mexico increased during the first year of Nafta. True. But what they fail to mention is that imports to the U.S. from Mexico increased even faster, with automobiles and other high-technology items increasing twice as fast. We were well on our way to a trade deficit with Mexico (and the big job losses that would entail) before the crash of the peso.
Worse, much of the increase in exports to Mexico came from items that boomerang back to the U.S. in the form of imports--for example, component parts shipped to Mexico for assembly into finished goods and infrastructure equipment for use in the building of factories.
And then there's the small matter of the wages of American workers. In Nafta's first year, before the collapse of the peso, America's 77 million production workers endured a 3 percent drop in their real hourly wages--the steepest one-year decline ever recorded.
That, of course, was directly related to the overall expansion of the labor pool under Nafta, and the fact that the number of companies choosing to relocate to Mexico has, as expected, accelerated. The chilling effect of these developments on wage demands should be obvious.
The peso devaluation has dried up the consumer market in Mexico. That simply means that as bad a deal as Nafta was originally, Mexicans are now even less able to buy American goods.
But it was Nafta that put us on this highway to nowhere in the first place. The collapse of the peso just increased the speed.
____________________
