By John Ross
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) included a provision for long-haul truckers from Mexico to operate inside the United States. Recently, the new administration decided not to allow it. I am relieved by the decision. NAFTA has made a great deal of money for corporations in this country by enabling them to use cheap labor in other countries.
The reason labor is cheaper in other countries is because they don”t pay their workers a living wage, they don”t provide workers and their families with health care or provide worker retirement plans or provide a safe place to work or provide the expensive environmental controls for manufacturing processes that we do.
The lack of ethics needed to outsource to countries that provide none of that is not addressed often by the media and certainly not by big business. All we get is self-serving rhetoric about innovation creating new jobs for Americans, but it isn”t happening, is it?
The idea that truckers from Mexico could actually come into our own country and take work away from us by not providing the training, medical qualifications, equipment safety for the drivers or the American public, environmental controls and good wages is frightening. The boundaries of our nation protect our way of life and they are dissolving. Protectionism is routinely described as ugly but isn”t the alternative reducing the American middle class to the status of the Third World?
I must confess this is a complicated issue, I do not understand it all and it is not settled by a long shot.
