Public Citizen analysis of NAFTA 2.0 text -14 pp
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Janet M Eaton
Oct 4, 2018, 12:42:12 AM10/4/18
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From: "Melinda St. Louis" <mstl...@citizen.org>
Date sent: Wed, 3 Oct 2018 20:15:21 +0000
For Immediate Release: Oct. 3, 2018
Public Citizen Analysis: How the New NAFTA Text
Measures Up to Key Changes We Have Demanded to
Stop NAFTA’s Ongoing Damage
Note from Lori Wallach, director, Public Citizen’s Global Trade
Watch
Here
is our initial 14-page analysis of the NAFTA 2.0 text, following up
on the
statement
from Sunday night. We have reviewed how the text
measures up to the changes to NAFTA that Public Citizen and many
other progressive organizations have long demanded. After some
exhaustive digging, which has been exhausting giving the 900 pages of
text and annexes, we have boiled down whole chapters into bulleted
highlights and lowlights and assessed whether demands are met or
there are mixed outcomes or it’s too soon to know or there’s been a
fail.
Overall,the NAFTA 2.0 text reveals a work in progress with some
improvements for which we have long advocated, some new terms that we
oppose and more work required to stop NAFTA’s ongoing job outsourcing,
downward pressure on wages and environmental damage.
The new text isn’t a transformational replacement of the entire
corporate-rigged U.S. trade agreement model that NAFTA launched in the
1990s. But at the same time, in key respects, this deal is quite different from
all past U.S. free trade agreements. The revised deal could reduce NAFTA’s
ongoing job outsourcing, downward pressure on our wages and
environmental damage
if more is done to ensure the new labor standards are
subject to swift and certain enforcement, and some other key improvements
are made. There’s a way’s to go between this text and congressional
consideration of a final NAFTA renegotiation package in 2019.
Important progress has been made with the removal of corporate investor
protections that make it cheaper and less risky to outsource jobs and a major
reining-in of NAFTA’s outrageous Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)
tribunals under which corporations have grabbed hundreds of millions from
taxpayers after attacks on environmental and health policies.
Termination of ISDS between the U.S. and Canada would eliminate 92
percent of U.S. ISDS liability under NAFTA and the lion’s share of total U.S.
ISDS exposure overall. This, combined with the major roll back of corporate
rights and ISDS coverage between the U.S. and Mexico would prevent many
new ISDS attacks on domestic environmental and health policies after more
than $390 million has been paid to corporation by taxpayers to date. That
even this corporate-compliant administration whacked ISDS means future
presidents cannot backslide and also sends a powerful signal to the many
nations worldwide also seeking to escape the ISDS regime.
A lot more work remains to be done: Unless strong labor standards and
environmental standards are made subject to swift and certain enforcement,
U.S. firms will continue to outsource jobs to pay Mexican workers poverty
wages, dump toxins and bring their products back here for sale.
Despite Donald Trump’s “Buy American/Hire American” rhetoric, the new
deal maintains NAFTA’s waiver of Buy American rules that require the U.S.
government to procure U.S.-made goods, so unless that gets fixed more
U.S. tax dollars and more U.S. jobs will be outsourced.
The new deal grants pharmaceutical corporations new monopoly rights so
they can keep medicine prices high by avoiding generic competition. This
could undermine the changes we need to make medicine more affordable
here and increase prices in Mexico and Canada, limiting access to lifesaving
medicines.
Areas of progress include a first-time-ever innovation of conditioning trade benefits
for a percentage of autos and auto parts on the workers producing them being paid
$16 per hour or more. Terms that forced countries to continue to export natural
resources that they seek to conserve are eliminated. Longstanding safety and
environmental problems relating to Mexican-domiciled trucks’ access to U.S. roads
are addressed. Rules of origin that allowed goods with significant Chinese and others
non-North American value were tightened.
Americans have suffered under NAFTA’s corporate-rigged rules for decades.
Nearly one million U.S. jobs have been government-certified as lost to
NAFTA, with NAFTA helping corporations outsource more jobs to Mexico
every week. The downward pressure on U.S. workers’ wages caused by
NAFTA outsourcing has only intensified as Mexican wages declined in real
terms since NAFTA, with Mexican manufacturing wages now 40 percent
below those in coastal China.
Lori Wallach
Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
215 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003 USA
215 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003 USA
Skype lori_wallach
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