The free trade disaster: Round two

Maude Barlow

Unlike the European Community, which has drawn up an advanced social charter, the United States did not negotiate any standards to protect social programs, wages, working conditions or environmental safeguards in the agreement with Canada and is not preparing to include them in the Mexican deal either. Without the protections built right into these agreements, standards are being pulled down to the lowest common denominator, allowing the transnational corporations to play countries and their workforces off against each other. Already, workers in Canada are being warned that if they don't pull their wages and other demands down, workers in Mexico will be only too glad to take their jobs. However, nothing Canadian workers can do is likely to save our battered manufacturing sector which is moving en masse to the low wage states in the U.S., or more recently, to Mexico. Even a cursory examination of the current situation in Mexico explain why....

The more Mexico shifts to an exporting nation, the more underdeveloped it is becoming as the transnationals control demand, supply, and prices..... These companies give nothing back to the country or its people. Real wages have fallen every year for eight years. No maquiladora profits go back into the communities for sewage treatment, education, health care or toxic waste disposal.... These companies are here for one reason and one reason only - there is no where else on earth where they can make the kind of profits they are earning here, and be required to give nothing back to the country or its people.

Maude Barlow, Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, writing in Council of Canadians Bulletin, October 1990. Available from Council of Canadians, 801 - 251 Laurier Avenue West, Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5J6.

Published in the Connexions Digest #53, January 1991

(CX4168)

Subject Headings

Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA)  Free Trade  Free Trade/Effects of

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