Or perhaps they were really "intended"?
Concerning the verdict on the intentional forces behind our systematic drift towards Income Inequality -- well, the Global Village is still out "deliberating" those facts.
vis a vis the effects of "competitive outsourcing" of American jobs to the Cheapest International Bidder, actually have on the average working American's Standard of Living?
As anyone who loses one of those jobs, can tell you -- the Impacts are life-changing. And not in a good way.
NAFTA’s Impact on U.S. Workers
by Jeff Faux, Economic Policy Institute -- Dec 9, 2013
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.
By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.
NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. [...]
[...]
NAFTA’s effects on employment, on the other hand, are hotly debated. Clinton administration officials estimated in the late 1990s that expanded trade in North America had created over 300,000 new U.S. jobs. Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economists Robert Scott and Jesse Rothstein contend, however, that such claims amount to “trying to balance a checkbook by counting the deposits and not the withdrawals.”
This is because NAFTA and other trade agreements have also increased U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico -- and by quite a lot more than exports. Since 1993, America’s trade deficit with its North American trading partners (exports minus imports) has ballooned from $16 billion to $82 billion annually. As Scott points out, “increases in U.S. exports create jobs in this country, but increases in imports destroy jobs because the imports displace goods that otherwise would have been made in the U.S. by domestic workers.”
Employment in virtually all U.S. manufacturing industries has declined since NAFTA went into effect. Counting jobs that actually left the United States plus those that would have been created if not for rising imports, EPI estimates that NAFTA caused a net loss of 440,000 U.S. jobs. In fact, during the 1990s, the overall U.S. trade deficit quadrupled, resulting in a net loss of 3 million jobs, according to EPI president Jeff Faux.
[...]
-- Ellen Frank teaches economics at Emmanuel College and is a member of the Dollars & Sense collective.
Trans-Pacific Partnership (NAFTA on Steroids) Threatens Sovereignty
by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D., theNewAmerican.com -- 26 June 2014
[...]
In its report entitled “NAFTA at 20,” Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch provided a primer on NAFTA’s enervating effect on the American economy. The paper reports:
NAFTA created new privileges and protections for foreign investors that incentivized the offshoring of investment and jobs by eliminating many of the risks normally associated with moving production to low-wage countries. NAFTA allowed foreign investors to directly challenge before foreign tribunals domestic policies and actions, demanding government compensation for policies that they claimed undermined their expected future profits. NAFTA also contained chapters that required the three countries to limit regulation of services, such as trucking and banking; extend medicine patent monopolies; limit food and product safety standards and border inspection; and waive domestic procurement preferences, such as Buy American.
Some of the specific harm caused by NAFTA is highlighted in the report:
1. $181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada
2. One million net U.S. jobs lost because of NAFTA
3. A doubling of immigration from Mexico
4. Larger agricultural trade deficits with Mexico and Canada
5. More than $360 million paid to corporations after “investor-state” tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies.
[...]
Trade Expert: Why TPP — “NAFTA on Steroids” — Must Be Stopped
by Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company, billmoyers.com -- Jan 9, 2014
[...] Global Trade Watch Director Lori Wallach spoke to Moyers & Company about NAFTA at age 20, and what it portends for other trade treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
[...]
Holland: Lori, what questions should people ask about the TPP that weren’t asked about NAFTA?
Wallach: Number one question to your member of Congress should be, have you read the actual full text of the agreement? Do you know about the investment rules that promote job offshoring? Do you know about the rules that require us to import food that doesn’t meet our safety standards? Do you know about the ban on buy American and buy local?
[...]
Robert Reich, on Facebook
January 26, 2014 · Berkeley, CA
STOP THE TPP. Congress is poised to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (that is, move it through both houses without opportunity for amendment). This massive trade pact with 11 Asian and Latin American nations, whose total population is almost 800 million and comprise 40 percent of the world’s GDP, is a high priority for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its corporate patrons because it would strengthen patent and copyright protections abroad, and encourage American corporations to make even more stuff overseas and ship it here. Americans benefit from cheaper goods from abroad only if Americans have the money to buy them. But this massive deal would further erode the jobs and wages of working and middle-class Americans while delivering its biggest gains to corporate executives and shareholders. Moreover, the deal’s environmental and labor safeguards are woefully inadequate, and it would give global corporations further rights to challenge American health and safety laws.
I still regret not doing more to strengthen the North American Free Trade Act's labor and environmental side-agreements when I was labor secretary under Bill Clinton. The TPP is NAFTA on steroids. Make a ruckus.
Ellen Frank of the Dollars & Sense, summarizes the overall economic Impacts of NAFTA, like this;
The result is one thing that almost everybody who studies trade now agrees upon. Whatever else they have wrought -- more jobs, fewer jobs, more or less poverty -- globalized trade and production coincide with greater inequality both within and between countries. The reasons for this are complex -- globalization weakens unions, strengthens multinationals, and increases competition and insecurity all around -- but the data are clear. Markets do not distribute wealth equitably.
Clearly there a winners and losers in such global trade deals -- it's just that "the winners" are NOT the workers.
They rarely are, ever since NAFTA introduced us to the infamous "Race Fast-Track to the Bottom," which most of us are already gingerly treading.
Whatever the {world} labor market will bear. Wherever too. It's a Flat World, afterall.
(About to become a WHOLE lot flatter ...)
-- NAFTA at 20: New Report from AFL-CIO