A recent New York Times lead story on the closing of the Indianapolis Rexnord Bearing plant (“Work freed her: then it moved to Mexico”) hit home for me; in fact, it’s my home plant, where I hired in almost 50 years ago and retired from a few months ago as president of Steelworkers Local 1999.
The piece noted the job “anchored” the life of the employees. Rexnord, like the nearby Carrier plant and other facilities, anchored the west side of Indianapolis for generations. But my one-time thriving community has lost ground over the years as these plants have pulled anchor and moved overseas.
President Trump made a big deal of this when he ran for president. Many know of his Twitter attack on me when I called him out on his “alternative facts” about Carrier’s move to Mexico (Carrier also is a unit of USW Local 1999). His job-saving claim wasn’t all he said it was, and about 600 Carrier jobs are headed to Mexico. But Rexnord was a Twitter topic of his as well. He noted the 300 workers there were about to be “viciously fired” and declared “No more!”
Well, as the Times article noted, about everyone at Rexnord is gone. But Trump’s got a chance to start making good on his pledge of “No more!” for others.
NAFTA negotiations are underway, and it’s got the US Chamber of Commerce squawking. And that’s music to my ears, because it means there might be some roadblocks to future job rip offs of the kind that have roughed up Indy’s West Side and hundreds of communities in the Midwest and the nation. Almost a million jobs have been federally certified as lost due to NAFTA. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
But Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative is demanding changes that could signal a change in the direction for negotiations. Such as:
· Eliminating job outsourcing incentives found in NAFTA’s special investor protections and their enforcement by NAFTA’s private, corporate-lawyer dominated tribunals.
· Cutting NAFTA’s open-ended loopholes (waivers) to our Buy American and domestic procurement requirements so we can use our tax dollars to create jobs at home.
· Ensuring higher North American content and guaranteeing at least some US content in goods benefiting from NAFTA (right now all kinds of non-NAFTA-country content gets a pass, undermining wages in each NAFTA country).
Finally, NAFTA is in its third decade untouched by oversight or performance standards. That is how today almost one million American workers are listed under just one narrow government program as having lost their jobs to NAFTA, even though NAFTA’s boosters promised the deal would create one million more jobs just in its first five years. That’s why I like our US Trade Representative’s idea of opening the treaty up to review every five years and requiring each country to sign off afterward. The way it is now, working people are kept at arms length when things go wrong, as they have been since the start of NAFTA.
The American worker doesn’t want a hand out. What we want is a fighting chance. Fixing NAFTA can help us with that.