Trump team rightly rattles cages at NAFTA talks

Three rounds of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations came and went without much fanfare. But the fourth round, held in early October, included strong Trump administration proposals which start to fulfill promises to get tough on trade. 

Mexico and Canada complained about the proposals. The NAFTA negotiations are now looming as the arena for a major international showdown.

Predictably, multinational corporations are howling with rage and fear, worried that they may lose important weapons in their perennial battle to reduce their U.S. costs by shipping jobs overseas and forcing U.S. workers to compete with low-paid foreign workers. 

Meanwhile, President Trump has let the media know that he would not be averse to walking away from the NAFTA agreement if his negotiators can’t bring him a good enough deal.

The two key NAFTA issues upsetting the free-trade coalition of multinationals and the Wall Street financial community are rules of origin for the auto industry and sunsetting.

Rules of origin state how much of the value of a car or truck must originate in the three NAFTA countries (U.S., Mexico and Canada) for the product to count as NAFTA-produced. The current requirement is 62.5 percent.

The Trump administration wants to raise that to 85 percent and add a new requirement for the U.S. content of the vehicle to be 50 percent for it to qualify as a NAFTA-produced vehicle. In the 23 years since NAFTA went into effect, the U.S. auto industry has suffered a loss of jobs and a substantial decline in inflation-adjusted wages, driven in large part by competitive pressure from Mexico.

According to a CPA analysis submitted to the U.S. Department of Commerce earlier this year, the real wages of auto production workers have fallen by 27 percent since 2002. In other industries, the wage declines have been smaller but still significant. The sectors with the biggest declines map directly to the sectors where the most production has moved to Mexico.

The wage disparity between the U.S. and Mexico is glaring. The average manufacturing wage in the U.S. is $26 an hour. According to reports from Mexico, a Mexican autoworker is paid between $2 and $3 an hour. That’s roughly a 10:1 differential.

In addition, Mexican wages have shown little tendency to rise in recent years — not surprising considering that labor unions in Mexico are essentially paper tigers controlled by management and the government, and Mexico suffers from ample unemployment.

The 10:1 ratio on wages was also cited in a recent New York Times article documenting the closure and shift to Mexico by Rexnord of a historic Indiana bearing manufacturing plant.

In the article, the American production worker, highly skilled machine operator Shannon Mulcahy, and her Mexican replacement worked out the ratio of his pay to her pay. Her replacement, Ricardo, determined that Rexnord can employ “ten Ricardos” for “one Shannon.”

A recent Department of Commerce study showed that the non-NAFTA content of U.S. automotive imports from Mexico has almost doubled between 1995 and 2011, the most recent year in which data is available. The non-NAFTA figure went from 14 percent to 27 percent.

The administration’s goal is to reverse that trend and also to increase the share of U.S. content in NAFTA-produced vehicles. This won’t stop the shift of production to Mexico, but it should slow it down. 

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is pushing for a “sunsetting” clause in NAFTA, requiring the agreement to end after five years unless all parties renew it. All business contracts in the U.S. are temporary. Courts will not enforce contracts that are permanent.

The reason is that technology, economic conditions, products and many other factors change over time. Why should trade agreements, which are business contracts between countries, be any different? The federal government should be forced to periodically consider whether an agreement continues to meet expectations sufficient to renew it.

If a NAFTA agreement cannot be reached, the U.S. should just walk away. Some deals just don’t work out, and NAFTA may be one of those. With a negative trade balance last year of $70 billion, NAFTA has led to a loss of some 4 million U.S. jobs. If that is not failure, what is?

Jeff Ferry is research director at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, an organization that represents the interests of U.S. producers and manufacturers.