CAFTA is a bad deal for African Americans
By Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Hilary Shelton
The White House is pressing business lobbyists to urge members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to support its flawed trade agreement with Central American countries and the Dominican Republic — the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
But members of Congress should not be fooled about this agreement, not when blacks’ wages have been basically stagnant in real terms since the 1970s (despite vast gains in productivity that should lead to increased real wages and living standards), and when the ranks of the black middle class are being decimated by long-term displacement. Both problems are linked to the increased competition with lower wage countries that these corporate trade agreements bring.
American workers are negatively affected by the unprecedented U.S. trade deficit, but blacks and Latinos are especially affected. For example, African-Americans are disproportionately concentrated in industries hit hardest by free-trade agreements, such as manufacturing. Between 2001 and mid-2003, 300,000 factory jobs held by blacks simply disappeared. Thanks in part to this erosion of the manufacturing sector, black men and women are now much more likely to be displaced from long-tenure, good-paying jobs than their white counterparts.
Just like the reckless provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), CAFTA will accelerate the pace at which jobs are outsourced overseas. But trade-adjustment-assistance (TAA) programs designed to help those who lose their jobs due to trade agreements remain woefully underfunded and ineffective. Today, more than a decade after the passage of NAFTA, TAA programs receive only one-quarter of the funding originally promised them.
Even if these programs were fully funded (a wild fantasy), it is far from clear that they would be effective. For example, only 14.2 percent of workers eligible for NAFTA trade-adjustment assistance actually received any benefits.
TAA also does nothing to address the problem of stagnant wages brought on by trade agreements. But the real question is, why should we spend millions of taxpayer dollars to help alleviate the effects of flawed trade agreements such as CAFTA instead of renegotiating the entire agreement?
CAFTA is also a step backward for labor rights. Under CAFTA, Central American countries are only obligated to uphold their own labor laws, which have been judged inadequate by the International Labor Organization in more than 20 ways. What’s more, the enforcement of these deficient laws cannot be encouraged through the use of dispute settlement, fines or trade sanctions.
If a country fails to uphold these laws, it simply must pay itself a one-time fine of $15 million, using this sum to address the violations of labor-protections laws of the offending country — if they even exist. It is less of an incentive actually to improve labor conditions than what is currently available under the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI).
Even putting labor conditions aside, CAFTA is bad for the health of people of color south of the U.S. border. The countries of Central America have high rates of infection of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, rates that go up even more if you look at just the Afro-Latino communities. Provisions in CAFTA would actually delay or limit the introduction of cheaper, generic drugs to combat or cure many diseases and other health conditions.
The result? Many of the 275,000 Central Americans living with HIV/AIDS will not be able to afford antiretroviral drugs. This impact will hit especially hard on Afro-Latinos, who make up a third of Latin America’s population, but represent 40 percent of Latin America’s poor. Maybe that’s why Doctors Without Borders, the American Public Health Association and many others have come out strongly against CAFTA.
Members of Congress should vote against this agreement. It’s bad for Americans, and it’s bad for the people of Central America.
Lee is the Whip for the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hilary Shelton is the director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau.
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/OpEd/072105.html