AMY GOODMAN: Pat Buchanan’s appeal to alienated white working-class voters has gotten the Clinton administration in a stir over how heavily to promote so-called free trade, what others call more free lunches for wealthy corporations, especially during this election year.

Today, there’s an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal about the internal White House debate over whether to include the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which is called CBI, which in some ways extends NAFTA to the Caribbean in the budget which President Clinton is releasing today. Vice President Gore won out, and it will be included. They’re also talking about extending the NAFTA sphere to Chile.

Now, of course, the White House is concerned about the political fallout, what it sounds like when he talks about free trade, how it’s heard. We’re concerned about the facts, what NAFTA has done in this country. And we’re joined now by Sarah Anderson, who is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. She has been studying NAFTA for a few years now. Today is the primary that is taking place, the Midwest primaries, taking place in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin.

Let’s start with these Midwestern states, Sarah. How has NAFTA affected them?

SARAH ANDERSON: OK, Amy. Well, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s impossible to calculate exactly how many people have lost their jobs to NAFTA. Last week, the AFL-CIO took a crack at it, looking at the tremendous trade deficit that we now have with Mexico, which is about $15.4 billion. And using that and the idea that all of these increased imports do displace jobs here in the U.S., the AFL-CIO is estimating that as many as 300,000 workers across the country have lost their jobs under NAFTA.

Well, today, we’re going to be looking just at these four states which have the primaries. And again, they’re Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. And one indicator of how many people have lost their jobs there is by looking at the retraining program that was set up under NAFTA for U.S. workers who lose their jobs as the result of the agreement. Now, we know that these figures are only a small fraction of the total job loss, but they are interesting in terms of finding out what kind of trends are happening. And looking at these four states, I see that laid-off workers at 87 firms have filed claims for NAFTA retraining assistance. That’s about average for across the country.

But looking a little bit further into these 87 cases, what really stands out in these four states is how many of them were unionized plants. The Midwest is still a heavily unionized region of the country, especially compared to the NAFTA job losses we’re seeing in the South, which tend to be non-union, lower-paying jobs in the apparel and electronics sector. What we’re seeing in these four primary states are more union jobs. And that really gets at the whole issue of the ’90s, I think, which is not so much what the number of jobs is, but the quality of those jobs. And a lot of people who are losing those union jobs are finding that while they may find another job, the quality of that new job is not as good as the one that they lost.

And if I could just tell one specific example, there’s a company called Owens-Brockway, which has a number of plants in the Chicago area. Well, only one of Owens-Brockway’s plants was closed last year as the result of NAFTA. Coincidentally, it was the only unionized Owens-Brockway plant in the Chicago area. Well, the company offered the workers at that plant jobs at their other non-unionized plants, but if they were going to take those jobs, they were going to have to take at least a 30% pay cut and start working 12-hour shifts. So that’s just one graphic example of what’s happening to workers who lose their jobs under NAFTA. They might get another job, but it’s very likely going to be lower-paying. It might be a temp job. It might be part time. And that’s why when the governors of these four states are going around bragging so much about the low unemployment rates in their states, we should be asking: What kind of jobs are those jobs?

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Sarah, a lot of people say that since NAFTA was instituted two years ago, that the trend isn’t that much bigger in terms of jobs being lost and corporations moving, say, to Mexico, that this was already happening.

SARAH ANDERSON: Actually, there has been a very steep acceleration of job loss. If you look at the people who are applying for the NAFTA retraining program, especially since the Mexican economic crisis hit in December of '94, we've seen almost a doubling in the rate of people who are applying for this program. And it makes a lot of sense. Companies that are operating in Mexico right now are paying their workers in very devalued pesos, but they’re selling their products in the U.S. for dollars, so they’re making tremendous profits there. And a lot of companies are moving to take advantage of that.

AMY GOODMAN: How about in the Midwest compared to the rest of the country? How does the Midwest compare?

SARAH ANDERSON: I think, in terms of the number of layoffs, as I said, it’s about average. As I said, there were 87 firms that had NAFTA-related layoffs in those four states. Other areas are much higher, and they tend to be in the South, in Texas, Florida. Also, Pennsylvania has had, I think, almost 200 layoffs. So, it’s — the number in the Midwest states is average. But as I said before, what makes them significant is that they tend to be higher-paying union jobs that they’re losing in those Midwest states.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, Sarah Anderson is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, where, interestingly enough, Pat Buchanan gets a lot of his ideas on trade. He gets all the documents that you all put out. How do you feel about that?

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, I don’t think I want to take credit for shaping Buchanan’s policies. I think they’re actually very different from ours, and they’re coming from a very different place. In fact, we have recently helped to draft a statement in response to Buchanan, and it’s being put out by the Alliance for Responsible Trade, which is a broad-based coalition that came together to fight NAFTA. And we drafted this response to Buchanan for a couple reasons. One is because, to be honest, it’s quite embarrassing for many of us who are opposed to NAFTA to be thrown into the same camp as Buchanan, and we wanted to very clearly lay out how our positions differ from his.

Another reason why we drafted this statement was because we saw the spotlight on Buchanan as providing us an opportunity for getting across the idea that there is a third way, that the debate on trade is not simply between the protectionists like Buchanan, on the one hand, and the free traders like Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, on the other. And this statement we released to anti-NAFTA members of Congress last week, because we think that it will be very useful for them in defending themselves against allegations that they’re just like Buchanan, that they’re racist and protectionist just like Buchanan, we hope this will give them the idea that there is another way. And basically, the people who are supporting this third way are people who see that trade is not all bad, that trade does have benefits. What is bad is that, under NAFTA, the benefits of trade are gained by only a few, namely the big corporations. And we feel that we need a different type of agreement that would ensure that the benefits of trade are spread out more equitably across society.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t we talk about what the Alliance for Responsible Trade has specifically come up with in — 

SARAH ANDERSON: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: — responding to what you’re calling “Buchanomics”?

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, the first part of the statement lays out the differences between Buchanan’s position and ours. And I think, to put it simply, Buchanan’s solution to the problems that we agree are the result of NAFTA — the job insecurity, the weakening environmental protections, the job loss and those type of problems — he sees the solution to all of that as being simply to raise a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, to cut off the flow of goods and people. And we think that that is not a legitimate solution to these problems.

First of all, on the immigration issue, we see that the reason why there is an increase in immigration from Mexico to the U.S. is the result of policies like NAFTA and other related development policies in Mexico. And it’s those policies that need to be attacked, not the immigrants, as Buchanan is doing.

On the trade issue, we feel that it’s unrealistic to assume that by raising a wall, you can stop U.S. corporations from moving [from] the U.S. to Mexico. We feel that the only way we’re going to reduce the incentives for companies to do that is by leveling the playing field, by bringing — between U.S. and Mexican workers, by bringing up wages and working conditions in Mexico. If we don’t do that, there’s no way we’re going to stop U.S. corporations from moving there, only to take advantage of workers and the environment in Mexico.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the issue of debt?

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, that’s another serious issue that we feel needs to be addressed. The Mexican economy is going to always be strapped, and it will be always difficult for them to create the kind of economic well-being that would help people stay there instead of leaving in desperation for the U.S. And we feel that if we’re really serious about dealing with Mexico’s economic problems, we’re going to have to renegotiate Mexico’s foreign debt and relieve a lot of that burden.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the things that Pat Buchanan talks about is the World Trade Organization, the specter of a world government taking over. What is your view on the World Trade Organization? And first of all, what is it?

SARAH ANDERSON: What is the World Trade Organization? You put me on the spot here. It is what used to be called the GATT, and it is supposed to handle trade disputes amongst most of the nations of the world. We agree with a more multilateral approach to handling trade disputes. And so, in that way, we are different from Buchanan, who sees it as a very big threat to our sovereignty. What we don’t like about the WTO is that we don’t think it’s very democratic. It’s still mostly technocrats and big businesses who are calling the shots there. And we believe very strongly that trade is an issue that needs to be dealt with, not just by big corporations. When these deals are negotiated, we want workers, representatives from environmental groups, community groups, consumer groups, other representatives of civil society at the table. And then I think we’ll come out with very different types of agreements.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting that just recently Canada went to the World Trade Organization. They filed a grievance on the Helms-Burton Act, that Clinton just signed off on, saying that it is an obstacle to trade, and they’re objecting to it. And Mexico is joining them with this, because both Mexico and Cuba — both Mexico and Canada trade with Cuba, and this Helms-Burton bill is going to apply sanctions to companies that, even if they are in Canada, even if they are in Mexico, that do business with Cuba. Let me ask you about the code of conduct that you’re proposing for corporations.

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, we think that any new agreement that would be a better alternative to NAFTA would have to be much more aggressive in holding corporations accountable for their actions. Free trade agreements like NAFTA give all kinds of benefits to corporations, and we think that they should have to give something back. For example, it’s the corporations that are polluting the U.S.-Mexico border, and we think they should have to pay to clean it up. It’s corporations that are profiting when they violate labor rights and exploit workers, mainly in Mexico, but also here in the U.S. and in Canada, and we think they should have to pay for that, too. So I think any new agreement would need to include codes of conduct for corporations and much stronger mechanisms for holding them accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: How can the U.S. government, instead of luring corporations south of the border, which often they do, and they have been called on occasionally by Congress, for example, actually supporting ads in trade magazines, like Bobbin for the garment workers —

SARAH ANDERSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — that encourages corporations to go south of the border, to El Salvador, where wages are lower. How can the U.S. government — can a government prevent a corporation from leaving? And do you think that’s a good idea?

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, I think it all gets down to: What are the incentives there for corporations? Right now every incentive is to pick up and move to Mexico. And that’s why I think we need this new, renegotiated type of NAFTA that would include much stronger provisions so that when corporations violate the rights of workers, when they violate environmental protections in NAFTA, that they know they are going to have to pay for that. And that is the only real way to reduce the incentives for them moving there.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, Sarah Anderson, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies here in Washington, D.C. Now, in terms of your differences with Pat Buchanan, over the last few months, when the corporate media has been talking about Buchanan as pro-labor, here on Democracy Now!, we have been talking about what his real record is. For example, he doesn’t support an increase in the minimum wage.

SARAH ANDERSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: He was part of the Reagan administration, which was instrument — which busted the PATCO strike, the air traffic controllers. What about the issue of striker replacement? We had believed that Pat Buchanan was for striker replacement, yet this past weekend it sounds like — 

SARAH ANDERSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — he went on TV and said he was for a ban on striker replacement.

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, I have my own theory on why he made that surprise announcement. Early last week, I got a call from someone in Buchanan’s office, and he was asking me about statistics related to the auto industry. And I said, “Gee, I’m not really an expert on this. Why haven’t you called the United Auto Workers, the UAW?” And he laughed rather nervously and said, “Well, actually, we have been trying to call them, but they don’t seem to want to return our phone calls.” And so, my guess is that the surprise announcement of Pat Buchanan to put a ban on a permanent replacement of strikers is a last-ditch effort to not only get the UAW to start returning his phone calls, but also to deliver the troops today in these primary states where the UAW has a high concentration.

AMY GOODMAN: You think if things get desperate later on today, he might call for an increase in the minimum wage?

SARAH ANDERSON: I think it’s likely. I think Pat really misses being the hot shot, the man in the spotlight, and he’s willing to do a lot to get more support. And labor is one area that people have thought would give him a lot of support. I really don’t think that they will. I think that the racist and nationalist solutions that Pat Buchanan has been putting out are not going to appeal to most rank-and-file members, people who were opposed to NAFTA.

I think one good thing about NAFTA was that it was a tremendous educational opportunity for many people. Thousands of people in the labor movement went down to Mexico, toured plants, met with Mexicans who worked for the same companies they do, and they understand that the worse things get in Mexico, the worse things are going to get here in the U.S., that we need to support the working people in Mexico, or there’s not going to be any way to stop U.S. corporations from taking advantage of them.

AMY GOODMAN: Who has signed your statement so far?

SARAH ANDERSON: Well, we’ve begun to — we’ve just begun to get signers, and we have about 20 now. It’s a very diverse group. There are about three labor unions, a couple of environmental groups, two family farm organizations. There are a number of religious groups and a few research institutes. And as I said, we have released this to anti-NAFTA members of Congress, but we are continuing to use this statement and will throughout the election season.

So, if there are people out there who are interested in seeing this statement, which is a citizens’ response to Buchanan and his economic policies, people could give me a call. And so, I’d like to give out my number, if I may. It’s here in Washington, D.C., at 202-234-9382, extension 227. That’s 202-234-9382, extension 227. And if you give me a call and leave me your fax number, I’ll fax you the statement. You can see if you’d like to also endorse it, either as an individual or an organization.

AMY GOODMAN: A couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to speak to Jay Mazur, the president of UNITE, the newly formed union between Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the ILG, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. I asked him about how he could be standing with Hillary Clinton, which he was in New York, after they had fought so hard against NAFTA. We just have a few seconds to go, but do you — he said, “Well, it’s one of a number of issues.” Do you see NAFTA as just one of a number of issues in the Clinton administration?

SARAH ANDERSON: I think it’s more than just one of a number of issues. I think it’s — he’s made it into his foreign policy. He’s made it into one of his greatest achievements. And the thing about NAFTA is that it’s tied to so many other policies, and it reflects a general attitude towards workers. It’s a policy that was designed for the interests of the Fortune 500 and not with the interests of workers and communities in mind. And that’s why it says so much about who he is.

AMY GOODMAN: Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies, thank you very much for joining us. Coming up next, two strikes. You’re listening to Democracy Now!