By chance, I was at a state labor conference the day that
the U.S. Senate passed the NAFTA treaty. The mood was grim.
Twenty-three years later, let’s see what the Wall Street
Journal said about NAFTA. The Journal’s lead editorial writer was Robert
Bartley. A supporter of NAFTA, he said, "I think the nation-state is
finished."
Bartley favored the free flow of goods and labor across borders.
He favored high rates of immigration to the United States.
Bartley spoke
favorably about Mexican President, Vicente Fox’s speech that declared that “NAFTA
should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not
only goods and investment but also people.”
In his July 2, 2001 Wall Street
Journal editorial, Bartley said, “during the immigration debate of 1984 we
suggested an ultimate goal to guide passing policies— a constitutional
amendment: 'There shall be open borders.'"
Here is a brief summary of a contrary view authored by labor
scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner in her 1996 study, “Final Report: The Effects of
Plant Closing or Threat of Plant Closing on the Right of Workers to Organize.”
The study concludes that NAFTA has created a climate that
has emboldened employers to more aggressively threaten to close, or actually
close their plants to avoid unionization. The only way to create the kind of
climate envisioned by the original drafters of the NLRA, where workers can
organize free from coercion, threats, and intimidation, would be through a
significant expansion of both worker and union rights and employer penalties in
the organizing process both through substantive reform to U.S. labor laws and by
amendments to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation.
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