The North American Free Trade Agreement

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) an agreement which allows international trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada without the penalties of import and export taxes was approved by the American, Mexican, and Canadian Governments between November 1993 and January 1994.

There were several very good objectives in mind when developing the idea for the NAFTA, but as history has told us, ideas never work as well in reality as they do on paper. The unforeseen negative impacts of North American Free Trade Agreement include a loss of blue collar jobs in the United States, a reduction in the import and export taxes that are gained from the international trade between the three countries, and in the jobs that were kept in the United States, there was a reduction in the average hourly wages of blue-collar workers because, if the corporation could pay someone less money in another country to do the same job, why pay someone in the United States to do it for more?

In the United States, unemployment went higher than it had been in many years because many corporations decided to relocate their operations to other countries in

order to save on labor costs. When this happened, employees were either offered the opportunity to relocate, or they were simply laid off. With the average hourly wage in the United States nearly six times that of average wage in Mexico at $1.85, there difference in overhead was monumental, and was difficult to pass up. This is a great advantage for the big conglomerates, because they are able to pay lower salaries to their employees, while not being responsible for the same employee benefits that they would be required to provide in the States. Also, they will be able to continue to...

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...obtain these jobs, it's not enough for us to give them some of our manufacturing and other blue collar jobs, there are still approximately 3 million border jumpers who run across the southern U.S. border every year. The worst part is that it is some of the companies who decide that it is not cost effective to outsource jobs to Mexico, due to the requirements of building new facilities and training new supervisors, they instead conspire to bring illegal aliens here to work for the same rates that they would in Mexico, and undercut hard-working Americans who pinch every cent they have with the hope of one day being able to live a modest life and provide a respectable education for their children.

Bibliography

"Trade Pacts War on the Home Front" New York times, Sept. 14, 1997

www.citizen.org/trade/nafta/index.cfm

Article from Denver post December 2, 1995