SHAFTED: Free Trade and America’s Working Poor
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once wrote that the division of labor among countries is that some specialize in winning and others specialize in losing. He further noted that his region of the world, Latin America, had specialized in losing since the time of Columbus. This same division exists within individual countries, wherein one class exploits another.
In Shafted: Free Trade and America’s Working Poor, Food First Books has put together a magnificent work explicating the mechanism of ‘Free’ Trade and how this furthers the interests of Transnational Corporations, to the detriment of the working class of the United States. Edited by Christine Ahn, the book is a series of first-person testimonies from voices as disparate as representatives of the American Corn Grower’s Association, the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, the UFWA, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the International Longshoremen’s Association. These oral histories vary greatly in tone and content; all, however, speak directly to the disaster that ‘Free’ Trade has been for all but the multinational corporations of the developed, First World. These testimonies are buttressed by an Introduction by Anuradha Mittal, “‘Free’Trade Is a Human Rights Calamity,” that provides contextual analysis, as does a final section by analysts such as Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO and Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
Among other things, the battle over Free Trade is a battle over the landscape of terminology.
So-called ‘Free’ Trade is not about the free and unfettered exchange of commodities, and opposition to it is in no sense synonymous with old-style protectionism such as the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Rather, ’Free Trade’, a catch-all term for a miscellany of organizations and treaties, such as NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], GATT [General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs] and the WTO [World Trade Organization], is about securing the unregulated ingress and egress of capital globally. It is the polar opposite of what progressives think of as internationalism, a capitalist dystopia. Absolutely amoral, the only imperative of international capital is increased profits and profit margins. A particularly brutal example of this is the case of the maquiladoras on the U.S.-Mexico border. Its proponents cited it as an example of open borders benefitting all. The reality was in fact the opposite: Manufacturing jobs fled the United States for the northern Mexico Free trade Zone, producing an increase in unemployment north of the border. The Rio Bravo del Norte region of Mexico saw a rapid increase in environmental degradation, as ‘protection’ from strict pollution laws is built in to the NAFTA framework. Finally, whatever minuscule benefits the maquiladora employees enjoyed from wages that were a fraction of those in the U.S. were short-lived. As of 2004, the vast majority of the companies that set up in the Free Trade Zone have fled to Southern China, where even lower wages obtain, the promises made as empty as the factories. This is something perhaps only capitalism could produce: a Lose-Lose Situation.
Food First — alternately known as the Institute for Food and Development Policy — gained renown for Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet For a Small Planet, for many their first introduction to the politics of food production and terms such as ‘protein complementarity’.
With Shafted their groundbreaking work continues, explicating for all the politics of trade policy and capital flow, and the fraud that goes by the innocent-sounding terms Free Trade and Globalization. This book is essential for anyone wishing to further understand what will only continue to be one of the most urgent issues of this century.
Shafted can be purchased directly from Food First.
Peter