Back in 1993, it was Texas billionaire Ross Perot in a bid for the White House who coined the "giant sucking sound" quip about American jobs being pulled to Mexico if the United States went ahead with plans for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Perot wrote a book with economist Pat Choate, "Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA Must Be Stopped Now!"
While labor groups and environmentalists were also critical of NAFTA, the overwhelming number of Americans appeared unfazed. The U.S. Senate went on to approve by a wide margin the agreement designed to reduce trade barriers with Mexico and Canada.
But today a majority of Americans now say that free trade comes at too high a price because local jobs are lost, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in September. It found that 54 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement: "Free trade is not worth it ... The U.S. needs to focus on keeping jobs for American workers."
A new anti-free-trade movement is emerging in the U.S. that is better mobilized, more vocal and encompasses more diverse groups -- from laid-off white-collar workers angry about their jobs going offshore to citrus growers in Florida who fear repealing tariffs will drive them out of business.
The breadth and unity of affected groups is not lost on the American labor movement or the coalition that mounted efforts to defeat NAFTA.
"People who've never come together before like farmers and environmentalists, Republicans and leftists, libertarians and Democrats, people who are ideologically apart now agree to oppose what they see as harmful," says Eric Rubin, state coordinator with the Florida Fair Trade Coalition, part of the national Citizens Trade Campaign founded by a Ralph Nader group in 1992.
AFL-CIO South Florida President Fred Frostsays in 25 years he's never seen such a mobilization as is now taking place to protest the proposed hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA.)
The umbrella group of 64 affiliated unions represents 100,000 workers in South Florida. Nationwide, the AFL-CIO counts 13 million members.
National leaders from the AFL-CIO as well as the steelworkers, service employees, communication workers, machinists and electrical workers unions will be in Miami this week rallying the rank-and-file from around the country to protest at the FTAA meetings.
As many as 150 busloads of union members and 30 buses of retirees from Florida and across the country are expected to join locals demonstrating at Miami's free-trade summit this week, says Frost.
"We're going to have teachers, communication workers, plumbers, aircraft workers, longshoremen, postal workers, nursing home workers, your neighbors and others," says Frost. "You'll see a massive coalition saying `No to FTAA."'
The groups will hold marches, rallies, a workers' forum and cultural events in support of workers' rights.
They don't the U.S. to pull out of free trade, but instead want enforceable worker rights in the FTAA.
U.S. labor's main objection is that free trade encourages companies to flee to countries with cheaper labor costs. NAFTA led to massive job losses; FTAA will further erode the U.S. job market, critics say.
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank in Washington D.C., estimates that 27,000 jobs lost in Florida in the last three years are NAFTA-related. Job losses were primarily in electronics, apparel and agriculture industries.
Local examples include: Motorola Inc., which let go 900 employees in Boynton Beach last year when it decided to relocate the electronic paging factory to Mexico; Johnson & Johnson's Cordis unit in Miami Lakes that let go 275 workers at its medical products facility after it moved production to Mexico in 2001 and Iori Farms in Hialeah that blamed NAFTA imports for letting go 628 workers in 2001.
"NAFTA has been a failure on the American job front," says Thea Lee, assistant director for international economics for the national AFL-CIO.
Labor groups blame flawed trade policies for nearly one-third of the 2.5 million manufacturing jobs, or 766,000 jobs, lost in the last three years, primarily to Mexico and China.
But a study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace finds that NAFTA has been neither the disaster its opponents predicted, nor the boom hailed by its supporters.
"I think the numbers that the AFL-CIO determined as job losses attributed to NAFTA are not unreasonable," said the report's co-author Sandra Polaski, former U.S. Secretary of State's representative for international labor affairs who will be speaking at the FTAA summit. "But jobs have also been gained. The net effect is a small net positive gain [in the U.S.]"
The Carnegie report, "NAFTA's Promise and Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere" is expected to be released during the summit.
Others see that stifling free trade could harm the U.S.
Some Florida sectors would be winners under the FTAA, such as exporters of electronics, shippers, pharmaceutical, legal, banking and accounting firms, says Miami attorney Milton Ferrell, who calls himself a liberal Democrat. That will generate new jobs here and elsewhere, he adds.
"We've lost nearly 3 million jobs in this country, I don't believe trying to stop free trade will get them back," says the managing partner of Ferrell Schultz, a South Florida law firm that in the last three years has opened 14 affiliate offices in Central and South America. "I do believe that the U.S. government needs to step in and make sure displaced workers get retraining for new jobs."
If approved, FTAA would create the largest free-trade zone in the world, a 34-nation, $13 trillion trading bloc by 2005 that would phase out most barriers to foreign trade and investments. Proponents point out that globalization reduces production costs, making goods more affordable for consumers. They also argue that trade brings prosperity to both trading nations, raising living standards for its citizens. But government planners, in drafting rules for free trade, have not included concerns of workers or environmentalists, say critics. They, too, want a seat at the negotiations but instead, are relegated to submitting written statements and taking protests to the streets.
"It's not just free trade or no trade," says Lee who co-authored the AFL-CIO's submission to the FTAA ministerial. Lee says the AFL-CIO does not expect companies in developing markets to pay American wages or have American workplace safety standards.
"That's unrealistic," she says. "But there are what we call poor labor standards such as freedom from child labor, freedom from forced labor and a worker's rights to organize that we believe should be included in any trade agreement. A country should lose trade status if they don't abide by basic rights and treat their workers like human beings."
Joan Fleischer Tamen can be reached at jtamen@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5030.
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.