[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 140 (Thursday, October 9, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H8809]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    NAFTA DOES NOT KEEP ITS PROMISES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Thune). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Brown] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, they are your typical working family, 
husband, wife, two kids. Both parents work in an auto plant, but they 
are still having trouble making ends meet.
  They dream of moving into a little nicer home and providing an 
education for their children, but it is hard to get ahead when they 
only make $40 a week apiece, barely enough to put food on the table and 
keep their kids in clothes.
  Rafael and Felicia Espinoza work for a large multinational 
corporation in a maquiladora plant in Reynosa, Mexico, across the 
border from McAllen, Texas. They make 90 cents an hour. For them, as 
for thousands of American workers with whom they compete for jobs, 
NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, is a series of broken 
promises.
  I sat with Rafael and Felicia last Thursday afternoon in their 
ramshackle home in one of the hundreds of colonias that have sprung up 
around Reynosa in Mexico. They have no electricity, no running water. 
They have a propane tank to fuel their cooking stove, and they have 
hooked up a cheap little television to a car battery.
  They told me their roof leaked. They said they suffer in the winter 
because the house is poorly constructed. As we talked, their children, 
happy as most children are when they have loving parents, ran barefoot 
on the dirt floor. Rafael is a proud man, but he worries about the 
future because a kilogram of chicken costs up to 30 pesos, about 10 
percent of his weekly wage.
  NAFTA has failed Rafael and Felicia in part because the Mexican 
Government refuses to enforce its labor laws. Companies under Mexican 
law are required to distribute 10 percent of their profits to their 
workers. Needless to say the Espinosas and their coworkers have yet to 
see a peso of these profits. The American company claims that it has no 
profits from its Mexican operations, which they say operates as a cost 
center, not a profit center.
  The NAFTA side agreement on labor has been no help to the Espinoza 
family. Indeed, they have seen other workers lose their jobs by trying 
to form an independent union to replace the company controlled 
syndicate, leaders of which have been known to inform on the reformers.
  They are undaunted. ``I am going to continue going forward,'' Rafael 
said in Spanish, all the while looking straight at me. ``There is no 
law that says it is a crime to have a real union. Even if they fire us, 
we will continue fighting until we have a union that will wake up and 
defend our rights under the law.
  ``The company says it is losing money, but we know it is not. We need 
the maquiladoras because of our terrible necessity to be working, but 
they are taking advantage of us for their own interests. We know the 
company does not want bad publicity, so why is there such injustice? I 
am not afraid,'' he continued, ``on going forward for myself and my 
family for my children. We will not quit.''
  A neighbor, Rita Gonzalez, earns about a dollar an hour. Out of her 
$40 weekly paycheck, her employer deducts $9 for a very small stove 
which she proudly showed off in her tiny home, one-quarter of her 
paycheck for the next 52 weeks for an appliance that would not cost 
$200 in the United States.
  While the Gonzalez family was lucky enough to have electricity, they 
have no running water and no indoor plumbing. Her brother-in-law, who 
is 25, suffered nerve damage to his face. They think it is because he 
worked around massive doses of lead at this American company doing 
business in Mexico, this American company, of course, which does not 
use lead in its operations in the United States.
  The NAFTA agreement has failed utterly to keep its promises to Rafael 
and Felicia and Rita and thousands of Mexican workers. They have no 
effective representation in their workplace. NAFTA has failed to keep 
its promises to thousands of working American families. They cannot be 
expected to compete for a dollar an hour. And it has failed to keep its 
promise of a cleaner environment. The border is a disaster area of 
polluted water and chemical poisons.
  A trip to the border exposes almost immediately NAFTA's broken 
promises. And those promises should be kept before we rush headlong 
into another trade agreement that punishes workers on both sides of the 
border.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair will entertain further 1 minutes 
at this point.

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