NAFTA

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Ohio's jobs and trade message to our Nation is as loud and clear as it always has been: trade must be about people, not just goods.

The job and wage destruction due to the original NAFTA continues to reverberate across our State and the heartland. It undermines the economic security of hundreds of thousands of workers within our State and millions more across our Nation. Following the original NAFTA's implementation, town after town was emptied out of good jobs with good wages and benefits as jobs were outsourced south of our border.

America has borne witness to NAFTA's vast job outsourcing and wage drag. Millions have suffered firsthand as dire predictions actualized and the grandiose promises of job creation failed to materialize. Our Nation has lost thousands of jobs to penny-wage environments where workers cannot even afford to buy the goods they make. They toil in sweatshops and maquiladoras, exposed to unimaginable toxins and unsafe working conditions. The original NAFTA fueled massive peasant migration from Mexico's countryside to our Nation as thousands of subsidized farmers in Mexico had livelihoods extinguished. Mexico's white corn industry disappeared. It was decimated.

What a humanitarian tragedy is NAFTA. If anyone cares about people, not just goods, listen to my words: America must wake up to the impact our trade deals impose on people when negotiating with unequal economies.

Just look to the devastation levied when multinational corporate interests dominate negotiations. Transnational banks and multinational corporations put a heavy thumb on the scales of economic justice for the poorest and for workers in our country as well as Third World economies. They exploit powerless people. Trade with our closest neighbors is never simply a zero-sum game.

In the nearly three decades since NAFTA's original passage, our Nation has not even had 1 year of balanced trade accounts with Mexico and Canada. It has always been in the red.

Indeed, the NAFTA deal has managed to add over $1 trillion to America's trade deficits--red ink--and millions and millions of outsourced U.S. jobs.

Mr. Speaker, NAFTA renegotiation is too important an opportunity to hang on faulty assumptions. America fell for that back in 1993. We cannot let it happen again.

The devil is in the details. Incremental progress to uplift North American workers devastated by the original agreement will not be enough.

With the release of text, which remains unfinished and unresolved, comes the task to determine whether the job outsourcing bonanza that has taken hold since NAFTA's passage in 1994 has truly been addressed.

Let me ask:

Have strong, enforceable labor standards been included, subject to swift and certain enforcement?

Will transnational corporate interests retain the means to outsource American jobs to take advantage of rock-bottom wages in Mexico?

Will we protect the rights of Americans to know what is in the imported food they are feeding their families, or will trade facilitation hold priority over food safety for people?

Will Americans have access to affordable prescription drugs, or will the new NAFTA further rig the system to delay access to more affordable, safe generic drugs and biosimilars?

Let me ask people who visit Ohio to witness vivid evidence of a trade agreement that failed America's workers and communities as plant after plant shuts down. Beyond just the NAFTA trade deficit, all our global trade deficits have ballooned under this administration's erratic trade agenda.

In this wake, a modern NAFTA agreement to correct these injustices is long overdue. I have eagerly anticipated the release of specific text and a strategic agenda from this administration on how President Trump plans to bring living wage jobs back to America. Anything short of specifics that will clearly improve job prospects for Americans will fall short of the President's promises.

Congress must not rush any deal of such magnitude by only letting the executive branch negotiate. Democrats have called on this administration to work with Congress to reach necessary and substantive achievements beneficial for all Americans. No more fast track. No more.

Any new North American trade agreement must raise wages. It must create jobs in America and create a level playing field across the board.

Mr. Speaker, after a quarter century of job hemorrhaging and the upending of American workers and livelihoods, NAFTA must result in rising standards of living and new jobs that create real wages and benefits here in our country.

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