DONALD TRUMP probably thinks he won the first presidential debate more than anyone has ever won anything, but everyone else knows he was horrible–except for the opening minutes when he went after Hillary Clinton for her husband Bill’s promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) while president and her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) while she was secretary of state under Barack Obama.
Trump scored points on these trade deals because they’re the only issue he can talk about for more than two sentences–and because Clinton’s response that she’s no longer down with the TPP was so weak. I doubt even the voters most passionately #WithHer really believe that one.
Heading into the second debate on Sunday, expect Trump to keep hammering away about Clinton letting Mexico and China “steal our jobs,” and Clinton to counterpunch by pointing out how many Trump Organization products are made overseas.
Both are trying to pose as defenders of ordinary Americans against unfair economic competitors overseas–and both have to distort the facts and distract from their actual political beliefs to do it.
First, international trade agreements aren’t the cause of all or even most manufacturing job losses, and they have nothing to do with the loss of good-paying jobs in other sectors of the economy.
NAFTA isn’t the reason why truck drivers earn less than 75 percent of what they did 40 years ago; why the number of unionized Verizon workers fell from 85,000 workers in 2000 to under 40,000 today; or why many of the country’s biggest employers pay poverty wages.
But don’t expect either candidate to talk about the deregulation of the trucking and telecommunications industries, nor the union-busting campaigns at Walmart and in the fast-food industry.
Debating global trade obscures the true causes of declining living standards and rising economic inequality–and that’s just how both candidates like it, even though they’ll violently disagree with each other in the process.
Xenophobic attacks on foreign countries are the essential way that Trump poses his pro-corporate policies as right-wing populism–while Clinton’s condescending response to anger over trade deals–“We are 5 percent of the world’s population, we have to trade with the other 95 percent”–allows her to paint the destruction of working-class communities as an inevitable part of globalization.
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NAFTA HAS been horrible for working people, and the TPP could be even worse. But the problem with these trade deals isn’t that they let foreigners “steal American jobs,” but that they rob people in all the countries involved of their democratic rights to have environmental, health and labor regulations on the operations of global corporations.
Americans who rightfully oppose these deals need to be clear that the main villains are U.S. corporations–and the main victims are workers and farmers around the world.
Trump likes to bark about NAFTA being “great for Mexico,” for example–for some reason, he seems unconcerned with how it’s helped Canada. But the trade deal has actually been devastating for the majority of Mexicans–especially the estimated 1 million farmers forced off their land because of its provisions about agricultural trade.
NAFTA’s impact in the U.S. has been more mixed, as Lance Selfa pointed out in Socialist Worker:
Even after NAFTA went into effect in late 1993, employment in U.S. auto parts and manufacturing increased from 1.1 million to 1.3 million by 2000. The number of jobs then dropped to about 1 million by 2005-06–before falling off a cliff in the onset of the 2007-08 Great Recession.
Employment in this sector hit bottom at around 623,000 in mid-2009, before the Obama administration’s auto bailout plan and the onset of an office recovery. Auto parts and manufacturing now employs about 925,000, about 50,000 workers below January 1990 figures, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The main source of declining living standards for autoworkers in the 21st century, Selfa notes, has been “declining union membership, speedup, two-tiered wages and greater subcontracting across North America”:
In 2009, the Obama administration’s bailout plan for the industry tore up union contracts, enforced two-tiered wages and required the surrender of a generation’s worth of work rules. It was the U.S. government under a Democratic Party president that demanded these concessions, not the Mexican or Canadian governments.
NAFTA has resulted in some industrial production being relocated from the U.S. to Mexico. But during this same time, other corporations have moved plants from union to non-union states inside the country.
Thus, Trump repeatedly denounced the closure of a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana that is being re-opened in Mexico, but he seems to care far less about the Carrier workers in upstate New York who have seen their work go to Georgia.
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BASHING FOREIGN governments and workers comes naturally to right-wing demagogues like Trump, but liberals aren’t immune from the temptations of nationalism. American labor leaders have too often chosen protectionist “Buy American” campaigns, which allow them to “partner” with employers and politicians, over organizing the unorganized and action in the workplace to fight for better jobs.
This year, Bernie Sanders’ genuine (sorry Hillary) opposition to the TPP became touchstone for millions of Democrats sick of their party’s long history of selling out the labor movement.
Back in 2008, for example, a certain Barack Obama lost the Ohio primary to Hillary Clinton after it was reported that his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee had assured Canadian government officials that Obama’s stated opposition to NAFTA “should be viewed as more political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”
Sanders is now out of the race and backing Clinton, but his Democratic Party pressure group “Our Revolution” has made stopping the TPP its main non-electoral objective. Opposing the TPP is important, but it’s also important that Sanders’ former supporters see this fight as based on solidarity with workers in all the affected countries, not blaming them for “stealing” jobs–and also the understanding that this has to be just one part of a broader working-class agenda.
The fight against the TPP doesn’t address the spread of anti-union “right to work” laws across the Midwest or the challenges in coming years as driverless cars threaten the livelihoods of millions of truckers and cab drivers.
The path toward victory on all these fronts goes through organizing and rebuilding strong unions capable of taking on corporations and winning.
Verizon workers showed that it’s still possible to strike and win this summer when they defended their job security against a powerful and profitable corporation intent on taking it away. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has set a strike date for next week to protect schools from devastating cuts being imposed by Democratic mayor (and key Clinton and Obama ally) Rahm Emanuel.
But don’t expect either Clinton or Trump to mention anything about the CTU strike this Sunday night. Neither one of them even mentioned the word union during last week’s 90-minute debate.
That was more revealing than anything either candidate said about trade.
