No sólo los mexicanos deploran el TLC, los canadienses y aún los americanos saben que las únicas beneficiadas han sido las grandes corporaciones, porque en general el salario del trabajador común en términos reales ha declinado (en México esto ha sido brutal ya que la inflación ha sido mucho mayor sin aumentos salariales correspondientes) y los empleos mejor pagados tanto en EU como en Canadá se han movido a otros países.
In the aftermath of Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's threats to "renegotiate" NAFTA — or pull out — the usual suspects have been activated to tell the world how wonderful the deal has been for Canada and the United States.There is no doubt that the sector that devised the scheme in the first place and sold it to politicians have benefited greatly from this investors' rights agreement and its predecessor. The continent's largest corporations have greatly reduced regulatory impediments to their profits, radically lowered labour costs, gutted Canada's sovereign capacity to pass new environmental legislation and, in terms of investment restrictions, virtually erased the borders.
But even if NAFTA were responsible for increased trade, Canadian workers have paid a huge price. Throughout the 1990s, federal governments trumpeted the need to be "competitive" under NAFTA as an excuse to implement some of the most Draconian rollbacks of Canadian social programs ever undertaken. In the name of "labour flexibility," Paul Martin implemented drastic changes to EI eligibility, and repealed the Canada Assistance Plan, freeing the provinces to gut their welfare programs. His extreme low-inflation policy deliberately kept unemployment at high levels (8 per cent to 9 per cent) for most of the 1990s.That meant that, throughout the decade, workers' real wages actually declined. They still have not caught up to 1981 levels. And the highly paid 220,000 industrial jobs lost as a result of NAFTA are gone forever, replaced by lower-paid jobs.
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