Taking Note
FR
Class, Community and NAFTA In early September, 300 of the heaviest hitters in the economics profession signed an open letter urging the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement...
...An arsenal of theories and models," wrote Nasar, "supports the conclusion that the trade agreement would have a minor impact on the United States...
...A "good" agreement, say Mexican political scientists Jorge Castafieda and Carlos Heredia-and much of the opposition in Canada, Mexico and the United States-would subsidize adjustment costs in all three countries, especially the retraining and employment of displaced workers...
...The poet-farmer Wendell Berry says the argument over free trade "is between people who belong to communities that they wish to preserve, and people who belong to no community and who therefore are willing and ready to destroy any community that gets in their way...
...People live in communities, in social arrangements...
...Seen through the prism of class, of course, free trade takes on a few extra nuances...
...The remainder of the article was like a pin in a balloon...
...That's as good a point of departure as any for the trade debates that still lie ahead...
...Class, Community and NAFTA In early September, 300 of the heaviest hitters in the economics profession signed an open letter urging the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by Congress...
...debate-the effect the agreement would have on the number of U.S...
...This mobility has been producing an international and increasingly casual workforce loosened from its local and national moorings...
...But we have reached an untenable juncture for social-and in the long run, economic-practice...
...They believe, she wrote, that "opening the U.S...
...When labor is "available"-read desperate and willing-we may have reached the ideal point for economic theory: individuals, unencumbered by tradition or government regulation, selling their ability to work on perfectly free markets...
...And since labor is one of the anchors of social life, casual labor has tended to produce a casual basis of social existence...
...As for the central issue in the U.S...
...Most, like labor analyst Harley Shaiken, have argued for a "social charter" that would institutionalize worker and union rights as "the foundation of further economic integration in the Western Hemisphere...
...Any agreement must take those arrangements into account...
...North American workers have already-for better or worse-been uprooted by the rapid cross-border mobility of capital...
...Trade union and Left critics of NAFTA have argued for a trade agreement that would take into account not only the number of jobs, but the kinds of jobs, the security of jobs, the rights inherent in jobs, and the nature of the relationship between employer and employee...
...NAFTA, as currently written, would allow each country's historically negotiated rights and regulations to be overridden by a secretly negotiated agreement among all three countries...
...And that's worth writing a letter-and a headline-about...
...So what's at stake here...
...The economists are not closing ranks to defend Mexico, but to defend their professional property: the idea of free trade...
...Why the headline...
...The political battle may be raging, but the real debate has long been closed...
...Economic integration inevitably brings with it an international set of social arrangements...
...It would deal fairly and even-handedly with the difficult issue of worker migration...
...In the debates over NAFTA, the "special interests" and the "demagogues" may tell tall tales about the agreement's dire effects, but straightforward economic logic, they say, has always been on the side of free trade and free markets...
...The New York Times welcomed the economists into the fray with the front-page, debate-closing headline "A Primer: Why Economists Favor the Free-Trade Agreement...
...market would strengthen the hand of a pro-American, profree market government in Mexico and help Mexico's citizens...
...NAFTA, they said, would be neither a windfall nor a disaster...
...Why the letter...
...Nasar concludes it must be the economists' concern for Mexico...
...When all is said and done, it may be the economists who are telling the tall tales...
...Trade must be an extension of another set of social relations...
...The story beneath the headline, by economics reporter Sylvia Nasar, began with great anticipation: "When economists of every stripe agree on anything, it is noteworthy...
...In doing so, it would attempt to harmonize standards upward, in part by establishing a common regulatory framework...
...It would encourage long-term national planning and open, democratic dispute resolution...
...jobs created or destroyed-the economists predicted the effect would be slight at best...
...Nasar has identified the concern, but her spin is just a little bit off...
...However inadequate those rights and regulations may be, their erosion by NAFTA would leave large networks of socialand environmental-protection at risk...
...Castafieda and Heredia would have the agreement foster a "European Community-style social-market economy" over the present model of free-market "Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism...
Vol. 27 • November 1993 • No. 3
