Class, Community and NAFTA In early September, 300 of the heaviest hitters in the econom- ics profession signed an open letter urging the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by Congress. The New York Times welcomed the economists into the fray with the front-page, debate-closing headline "A Primer: Why Economists Favor the Free-Trade Agreement." The story beneath the headline, by economics reporter Sylvia Nasar, began with great anticipa- tion: "When economists of every stripe agree on anything, it is note- worthy." The remainder of the arti- cle was like a pin in a balloon. "An arsenal of theories and models," wrote Nasar, "supports the conclu- sion that the trade agreement would have a minor impact on the United States." As for the central issue in the U.S. debate-the effect the agreement would have on the number of U.S. jobs created or destroyed-the economists predict- ed the effect would be slight at best. NAFTA, they said, would be neither a windfall nor a disaster. So what's at stake here? Why the letter? Why the headline? Nasar concludes it must be the econo- mists' concern for Mexico. They believe, she wrote, that "opening the U.S. market would strengthen the hand of a pro-American, pro- free market government in Mexico and help Mexico's citizens." Nasar has identified the concern, but her spin is just a little bit off. The economists are not closing ranks to defend Mexico, but to defend their professional property: the idea of free trade. In the debates over NAFTA, the "special interests" and the "demagogues" may tell tall tales about the agreement's dire effects, but straightforward eco- nomic logic, they say, has always been on the side of free trade and free markets. The political battle may be raging, but the real debate has long been closed. And that's worth writing a letter-and a head- line-about. Seen through the prism of class, of course, free trade takes on a few extra nuances. North American workers have already-for better or worse-been uprooted by the rapid cross-border mobility of cap- ital. This mobility has been pro- ducing an international and increasingly casual workforce loosened from its local and nation- al moorings. And since labor is one of the anchors of social life, casual labor has tended to produce a casu- al basis of social existence. When labor is "available"-read desper- ate and willing-we may have reached the ideal point for eco- nomic theory: individuals, unen- cumbered by tradition or govern- ment regulation, selling their abili- ty to work on perfectly free mar- kets. But we have reached an untenable juncture for social-and in the long run, economic-prac- tice. People live in communities, in social arrangements. Trade must be an extension of another set of social relations. Economic integra- tion inevitably brings with it an international set of social arrange- ments. Any agreement must take those arrangements into account. Trade union and Left critics of NAFTA have argued for a trade agreement that would take into account not only the number of jobs, but the kinds of jobs, the security of jobs, the rights inherent in jobs, and the nature of the rela- tionship between employer and employee. Most, like labor analyst Harley Shaiken, have argued for a "social charter" that would institu- tionalize worker and union rights as "the foundation of further eco- nomic integration in the Western Hemisphere." A "good" agree- ment, say Mexican political scien- tists Jorge Castafieda and Carlos Heredia-and much of the opposi- tion in Canada, Mexico and the United States-would subsidize adjustment costs in all three coun- tries, especially the retraining and employment of displaced workers. In doing so, it would attempt to harmonize standards upward, in part by establishing a common reg- ulatory framework. It would deal fairly and even-handedly with the difficult issue of worker migration. It would encourage long-term national planning and open, demo- cratic dispute resolution. Castafieda and Heredia would have the agreement foster a "European Community-style social-market economy" over the present model of free-market "Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism." NAFTA, as currently writ- ten, would allow each country's historically ne- gotiated rights and regulations to be overridden by a secretly negoti- ated agreement among all three countries. However inadequate those rights and regulations may be, their erosion by NAFTA would leave large networks of social- and environmental-protection at risk. When all is said and done, it may be the economists who are telling the tall tales. The poet-farmer Wendell Berry says the argument over free trade "is between people who belong to communities that they wish to preserve, and people who belong to no community and who therefore are willing and ready to destroy any community that gets in their way." That's as good a point of departure as any for the trade debates that still lie ahead.
