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A couple articles in the NYtimes got me thinking about free trade. The first one is about the effects of nafta ten years after it was put into place ten years ago. Though it trys to strike an even handed note, it’s pretty clear from the article that the only people being helped by NAFTA are the corporations.
Now I understand the argument for free trade. In theory poorer countries should be able to get higher wages and more jobs and rich countires should see the benifits of cheaper goods. This is what happens but only in a very broad sense. If you look at the GDP’s of mexico and the U.S. they have probably gone up because of NAFTA. But you have to break down who get’s the money.
In the U.S. it’s corporations and stock holders (i.e. rich people) who are getting the majorit of the profits. Labor’s share of these new profits is nill.
On the other side of the border the situation is much murkier. It is a race to the bottom as far as wages are concerned, countries like mexico losing jobs to countries like China. On the other hand you can see the definite benifits of free trade while living in China. Peole in China have real chances for advancement. At the school I taught at last year, the majority of my students came from farming or other low class families and they will improve their lot in life. This wouln’t happen without free trade.
On the other hand, there are still a shitload of sweatshops in China,* and conditions there are not very good, the workers rights always bending to the wihes of the overseas investor. China has almost infinite reserve of cheap labor, meaning that if labor continues to have no rights they will hav no bargining power to bring up wages. People in the big cites will continue to have their lives improved while the countryside festers.
I have no idea how to fix this, as far as the U.S. is concerned, it plays into who ever can effectivly play a populist platform. Unfortunatly I think this favors GW because he can play the nationilist card and the american population is pathetically uninformed (not because they are stupid, because they are over worked) (note that GW is focusing his campaign on AM talk radio).
*i wish there was a way i could see the effects of sweatshops more easily, but in the cities you are rather shielded from the general effects of them. You see migrant workers doing construction or landscaping and there are a lot of beggars, but on the whole chinese people i know have comfortable lives. I proabbly don’t see the sweat shop workers cause they are working all day…