WELLINGTON -- When trade ministers from 34 nations convene in Miami Nov. 20, a group of Florida retirees also will be visiting that city -- 26 busloads of them.
And they won't be cheering the proceedings as negotiators discuss the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas pact. Instead, the 60- to 90-year-olds will be 1,000 strong on the patio of the downtown Marriott, delivering their own message through a variety of speakers in hopes of stopping the FTAA.
"I have yet to find an American who asked for this agreement. No one asked Congress for it," said Tony Fransetta, president of The Florida Alliance for Retired Americans Inc. "It didn't come from the citrus industry or from manufacturers. It came from multinational companies seeking even cheaper labor markets."
The 125,000-member statewide group, headquartered in Wellington, is part of the 3 million-plus-member Alliance for Retired Americans, based in Washington, D.C. About 400 members from Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast plan to head to Miami for the FTAA event.
Two-thirds of the alliance's members are former union workers from the auto, steel, construction and other industries. The other third includes retired lawyers, physicians, bankers and others.
When the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement was under consideration, the group was against it but didn't actively oppose it. After seeing the loss of an estimated 766,000-plus American manufacturing jobs since then, on top of 1 million auto manufacturing jobs in the past 20 years, they're not sitting back as this next huge free-trade agreement looms.
The FTAA would create a free-trade bloc comprising the Americas and the Caribbean, excluding Cuba.
At a cost of $40,000 for buses and T-shirts sporting the slogan, "Fair trade isn't free trading our jobs," the retired people heading to Miami are well-educated about the FTAA and its issues.
Acreage residents Jack Sickels, 78, retired as a tool-and-die worker from General Motors' Pittsburgh plant, and his wife Helen, 75, say they are worried about increasing globalization and its effect on the future of their five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
"We're going to be a poor country. It's going to be a banana republic," Helen Sickels said. "Before NAFTA, they said, 'You Floridians are going to have cheap tomatoes.' The prices have gone up, not down."
Said Jack Sickels: "We are losing the manufacturing jobs, first to Mexico, now to China, India and Malaysia. Now we are starting to lose the white-collar jobs. They are shipping them to India."
A fellow retired auto worker, 81-year-old Cletus Pirtle of The Acreage, also said free trade has eroded American manufacturing.
"We can't even buy anything that's made in this country. The spare tire for my '95 Olds was made in Chile," said Pirtle, who worked on the assembly lines at GM in Baltimore for "33.8 years."
Fransetta said that as many as 4,000 alliance members would attend the Miami meeting, but organizers have closed off many of the larger venues near the ministerial meeting at the Hotel InterContinental as part of a "security lockdown."
Fransetta said he hopes politicians will wake up and stop the FTAA.
"You can't continue to bleed the economy of this country and try to make us believe that is healthy," he said. "If this passes, it will lead to a depression in our economy and a worsening of the world economy as we know it today."
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. NoNonsense English offers this material non-commercially for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, i.e. the media service or newspaper which first published the article online and which is indicated at the top of the article unless otherwise specified.