Dangers of CAFTA

DANGERS OF CAFTA -- (House of Representatives - June 29, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, the people of the Buckeye State of Ohio send their sympathies to the Noah Harris family as well and pray for him and pray for his relatives and pray for all of those who have lost loved ones on the American side, on the Iraqi side, and those who are in theater this evening.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to dedicate my remarks this evening to CAFTA because the Bush administration cannot get the votes in this Congress, apparently, to expand NAFTA to Central America; and so they are now resorting to a number of myths in order to try to sell hard in these closing days. And one of the myths that they are talking about is jobs, and there was an ad in one of the newspapers up here on Capitol Hill today about blue jeans. And it is paid for by the very companies that are outsourcing our jobs and shipping them out to other places like Central America. And the ad gives us a really interesting choice on blue jeans. It basically says, do you want your blue jeans manufactured in the Dominican Republic, or do you want them manufactured somewhere in Asia?

My answer is I would like them manufactured in the United States of America where they used to be, in New York City, in Lower Manhattan, in North Carolina, in South Carolina, in Mississippi where people would like to be making the very products that we buy.

Interesting they do not even give the choice of manufacturing in the United States of America. That pretty much tells the whole story because workers in Central America make pennies, literally pennies. Largely women are sewing those jeans, and I have met some of them. They have to work 2 weeks, because their wages are so low, to afford one pair of jeans. And they make 400 to 600 pairs of jeans a day. Think about that. Think about who makes the profits off their sweat when you go to buy a pair of jeans.

In El Salvador and Nicaragua, two of the countries where they want to outsource more of our jobs, women workers can be fired for trying to stand up and get a contract to earn a decent wage, to be able to work for something more than starvation wages, which is what they termed what they work for. They are intimidated in the workplace.

[Page: H5473] GPO's PDF

In Guatemala and Honduras there are fines for anti-union discrimination, and you know what? Courts do not enforce them. Gosh. Does that shock us in Guatemala?

In Costa Rica company unions, that means the one who runs the company or owns the company, replace really legitimate independent unions. The business roundtable who paid for this ad, and it is not cheap to put an ad in this paper, really ought to tell us how to create jobs in America, in the United States of America.

Now, a second myth is labor rights. In fact, Ambassador Portman, the new trade ambassador, says expanding these trade agreements to Central America would provide the workers down there with the best labor standards of any trade agreements we have negotiated, except for one thing: he is totally wrong.

The truth is that the current trade system we have in place with the Caribbean countries allows our government to rescind trade benefits. It has real power for any country that is falling short in its labor commitments. The labor provisions in CAFTA by contrast have no teeth. So Ambassador Portman says, you know what, maybe they do not have any teeth, though I do not admit that publicly, but I will put some U.S. taxpayer dollars on the table, $40 million, and we are going to try to give them to those countries in hopes that they will enforce their laws.

Of course he does not say we are already giving over $50 million to all of those countries right now and they are not enforcing their labor agreements. They never have. Despite the current labor laws, all of the international reports show real enforcement of their laws do not exist. So why should we pass an agreement that undermines the Caribbean Basin Initiative Standards that helps to raise standards of living rather than lower them?

Finally, democracy. That is the other myth. If we just pass this CAFTA, why the people down there they will have more democracy. In fact, Ambassador Zoellick has said that. But you know what? The record shows in these countries when there is this kind of deregulation, the neo-liberal model, what you get is more people being put out of work. NAFTA cut wages in Mexico; NAFTA has created over 2 million people who were pushed off their farms who come here as illegal immigrants, people who are not treated with respect on this continent.

That is not the way to build friendships. You know what? In every one of those countries down there, in three of them no agreement has been passed; and in the other three, the agreement was ramrodded through in a very undemocratic way. We ought to begin democratically to treat our friends in Central America with the same kind of respect we demand of people here in the United States.

It is time to turn back CAFTA, renegotiate it, and start building a middle-class standard of living on this continent again.

http://thomas.loc.gov