Reuters
WASHINGTON - The North American Free Trade Agreement has failed to live
up to its promise of creating new and better jobs in the United States,
Canada and Mexico, according to a
study released yesterday by a liberal-leaning U.S. think-tank.
Instead, the free-trade agreement has eliminated more than 766,000 actual and potential jobs in the United States, mostly in large manufacturing states, the Economic Policy Institute argued in a report timed for the seventh anniversary of NAFTA.
Jeff Faux, EPI president, said the lessons of NAFTA should give government officials pause as they mull other free-trade agreements, such as the Western Hemisphere pact now under consideration.
"The experience suggests that any wider free trade agreement extended to the hemisphere that does not give as much priority to labour and social development as it gives to the protection of investors and financiers is not viable," Mr. Faux said in an introduction to the report.
For Mexico, NAFTA has encouraged job growth in towns bordering the United States. But "wages, benefits and workers' rights are deliberately suppressed" at these so-called "maquiladora" plants, the study argued.
As for Canada, the "net destruction of jobs was 276,000," according to the report.
These dour results, EPI argues, have been obscured by the economic boom the United States and other countries enjoyed during the mid- to late-1990s.
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