WEDNESDAY, DEC 11, 2019, 4:09
PM
On Tuesday morning, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Democrats had reached a deal with the Trump
administration to advance the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA),
also referred to as “NAFTA 2.0.” In explaining the deal, she said: "There
is no question of course that this trade agreement is much better than
NAFTA."
Progressives have criticized
Pelosi for potentially handing President Trump a political victory during both
an impeachment process and an approaching election. After all, Trump ran on the
promise that he would renegotiate NAFTA and now it seems that, with help from
the Democrats, he will. That could mean more GOP votes in swing states that
have been wracked by the damage of the original NAFTA deal. “It does appear
that if Trump gets a win on this new NAFTA, his chances of reelection go up
considerable,” wrote The
Intercept’s Ryan Grim. “He can say he delivered on his promises, and that
Democrats don’t really think he’s that corrupt after all, or they wouldn’t have
delivered him such a major victory.”
For her part, Pelosi appears
to believe that the deal might ultimately be beneficial for moderate Democrats
at election time, and many House Democrats certainly seem happy with the final
version of the agreement. “You know what I’ve said: These have been the
fights,” Pelosi reportedly told party
members during a caucus meeting after the agreement was secured. “And we stayed
on this, and we ate their lunch.”
The political implications of
USMCA remain to be seen and, since the final text of the agreement hasn’t yet
been released, it’s hard to assess its full impact. But we already have a
pretty good idea of what kind of relief it will supply for workers: not much.
A report
by economists Thea M. Lee and Robert E. Scott at the Economic Policy Institute
concedes that USMCA is a big improvement from the 2017 version, but concludes
that it ultimately adds up to “Band-Aids on a fundamentally flawed agreement
and process.”
Using statistics from
the U.S. International Trade Commission, Lee and Scott point out that, at best,
the deal will only create about 51,000 jobs over the next six years and could
raise the GDP by a few tenths of a percentage point. These potential jobs would
come in farming, manufacturing and mining. The report cites an International
Monetary Fund (IMF) working paper which predicts nothing but bad news for the
(already beleaguered) auto-industry. That same paper concludes that, “At the
aggregate level, effects of the USMCA are relatively small...effects of the
USMCA on real GDP are negligible.”
Trump continually referenced
the devastating impact of NAFTA on the campaign trail, while arguing that it
desperately needed to be renegotiated. However, the new agreement does nothing
to reverse the damage. While USMCA might generate 51,000 jobs, NAFTA eliminated over
680,000 of them.
Still, USMCA was ultimately
endorsed by the AFL-CIO, which also infamously supported the construction of
the Keystone pipeline and has criticized the
Green New Deal. Not only did the AFL-CIO back the agreement, its President
Richard Trumka was instrumental in securing an agreement between Democrats and
Republicans.
A piece detailing
the negotiations by Politico’s Megan Cassella reveals that Pelosi
refused to move the agreement forward unless Trumka signed off on it. She knew
that an endorsement from the group would give pro-labor Democrats enough cover
to come out in support of it. “I think everyone would acknowledge that Trumka
is key,” working group member Rep. John Larson (D-CT) admitted during the
process.
Cassella reports that Pelosi
ultimately had Trumka come to Congress to assure lawmakers that he was on the
verge of supporting the deal. Ultimately, he got on the phone with Trump and
after the president agreed to think about moving a pension bill forward, Trumka
slapped the deal with an AFL-CIO endorsement.
At least one AFL-CIO member
isn’t waiting for
the final text to decide whether or not the agreement is worth supporting. The
International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) released a
statement declaring its opposition to the agreement, citing the fact that it
does nothing to stem the outsourcing of jobs abroad. “Our ability to comment in
detail on this agreement is impaired because in the rush to consider such a
proposal, we have not even been given the opportunity to review the full
agreement in writing,” said the
group’s International President, Robert Martinez Jr. “U.S. workers have been
waiting for over 25 years for a responsible trade deal that puts their
interests ahead of corporations who are fleeing our shores. They are still
waiting. The IAM will oppose NAFTA 2.0.”
Robert E. Scott, co-author of
the aforementioned EPI report, told In These Times that IAM’s
opposition to the deal wasn’t surprising based on what NAFTA has done to the
industry. “The aerospace has been hard hit by outsourcing to Mexico,” said Scott,
“Their members are very concerned. I don't think there’s anything in there for
them. Very transactional deal.”
While Pelosi worked diligently
to pass USMCA, she’s failed to
move a robust pro-labor bill forward in the House. The
Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) was introduced in May
by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA). The bill would make it
easier for workers to join unions, extinguish right-to-work laws, crack down on
union-busting, address employee misclassification and provide new protections
for collective bargaining. The bill already passed the House Committee on
Education and Labor earlier this fall.
“I don’t know exactly what the
holdup is—it is taking longer than it should given the number of co-sponsors
that we have,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told The
Intercept’s Rachel Cohen earlier this month, “Many other bills have come
to the floor with fewer co-sponsors than this one.”
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