‘Fix this bad deal once and for all’

The North American Free Trade Agreement has been an unequivocal failure, sending jobs abroad, holding down wages and devastating communities. Only the Wall Street and Washington elite can claim NAFTA is yesterday’s war. For millions of American families, it’s today’s crisis.

We have an opportunity to fix NAFTA so it works for working people. Refusing to do so would constitute a moral and economic abdication.

The reason to rewrite NAFTA is not to turn back the clock, but to save the jobs we have and build a fairer economy for the future. Germany, for example, has done a much better job than the U.S. of maintaining manufacturing jobs even in the face of automation.

For more than two decades, NAFTA’s rules have fostered a race to the bottom, incentivizing offshoring by giving foreign investors special powers to challenge laws they don’t like in private tribunals. That’s not trade. It’s corporate welfare subsidized by American taxpayers in the form of lower wages, worse jobs and less opportunity.

The AFL-CIO has put forth a detailed plan for renegotiating NAFTA. President Trump promised a better deal for American workers. That’s what we expect — and that’s the standard for our support. Unfortunately, the first negotiating session did not inspire confidence. We will continue to demand a deal that expands the American dream, strengthens workers’ freedom to negotiate, and stops treating corporations like people.

While rules governing intellectual property and stateowned enterprises should be addressed, it is not realistic to assume we will ever become a nation of 300 million inventors. Tackling these important issues and writing a fairer NAFTA are not mutually exclusive. We should aggressively pursue both. But make no mistake, focusing solely on intellectual property protections isn’t a plan for working people.

NAFTA is one of the great public policy debacles in a generation, and it continues to inflict damage on working people in countless ways. Now is the time to fix this bad deal once and for all, not walk away in the name of “free trade.”