The United Steelworkers (USW) today criticized the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, Colombia and Panama as another attack on American workers at a time when the economy is struggling and unemployment remains unacceptably high.
 
“Historically, these agreements have closed American manufacturing facilities and cost American jobs,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. “It is foolish to think that this latest round will do something different.   Success should be measured by the jobs that are created, not the number of agreements that are enacted.  There are more USW-member jobs in the auto supply chain than jobs in the entire auto assembly sector and the Korea FTA's weak domestic content provisions will cause that U.S. job sector great harm.”

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was promoted as a job creator when it was negotiated in 1992 and signed into law in 1994. But according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), nearly 900,000 U.S. jobs were lost to NAFTA in the period between 1993 and 2002 alone. In addition, the agricultural provisions of NAFTA cost more than 1 million Mexican farmers their land and livelihood ... more