[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Pages 26773-26774]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         THE AFRICA TRADE BILL

  Ms. SNOWE. Mr. President, I rise today to voice my objections to the 
Africa trade bill. I have listened to how this bill will help those 
countries on the African Subcontinent, and I support that goal. 
However, Mr. President, what I don't support is watching mills close in 
my State, and around the country, and having to tell these people that 
they no longer have jobs because cheap labor overseas has either caused 
their company to go out of business or move overseas.
  At the same time, I don't believe that this legislation will serve 
the intended purpose of helping to raise the living standards of 
Africans through increased trade and economic cooperation between the 
United States and African countries. In order for this to occur, 
workers need to be paid well, treated well and have a suitable 
workplace. Workers in many countries in both Africa and the Caribbean 
Basin are subjected to abusive conditions at work while their 
governments remain uninvolved, or, with government complicity. This 
legislation does not have the provisions necessary to guarantee that 
the workers in these countries receive the benefits of U.S.-Africa 
trade.
  In addition, being from Maine, I understand the importance of 
balancing the needs of loggers with the desires of environmentalists. 
This legislation would result in increased rates of logging, which has 
been cited as the greatest threat to Africa's remaining native forests. 
As only eight percent of Africa's forests still exist in large 
undisturbed tracts, forcing African nations to give even more access to 
foreign logging companies could be fatal to these vital tropical 
forests.
  In the last 57 months, from December 1994 to September 1999, the U.S. 
apparel industry has lost 309,000 jobs. The textile industry has lost 
128,000 jobs, for a total of 437,000 American jobs lost.
  My home state of Maine has seen its fair share of lost jobs as well. 
Since 1994, 26,500 Mainers have been told that they no longer have a 
job to provide for them and their families. I have heard some of my 
colleagues state that this legislation is about jobs. Well, I am 
unwilling to trade well-paying jobs with benefits for lower paying 
ones--but that's precisely what's happened under our ill-conceived 
trade agreements. As the trade deficit and globalization of U.S. 
industries have grown, more quality jobs have been lost to imports than 
have been gained in the lower-paying sectors that are experiencing 
rapid export growth. Increased import shares have displaced almost 
twice as many high-paying, high-skill jobs than increased exports have 
created.
  It was my concern about the impact of foreign labor on the American 
job market, Mr. President, that led me to oppose passage of the North 
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993. Unfortunately, NAFTA has 
become a trade agreement whose provisions are not adequately enforced--
to the detriment of the United States, our industries, and our workers.
  I am in agreement with my distinguished colleague from South 
Carolina,
  Senator Hollings, in his assessment of NAFTA last week. We were told 
that NAFTA would create jobs in America. I have seen in my state that 
they were wrong.
  The U.S. textile and apparel industry has been decimated by imports 
from the Far East as a result of the Asian ``flu'' and also illegal 
transshipments that our government does not catch and which find their 
way into this country in what is estimated to be an annual volume of 
somewhere between $4 and $10 billion.
  For 23 years, U.S. imports have exceeded U.S. exports. Consequently, 
in the last quarter of the 20th century, the United States has amassed 
a total trade deficit of more than $2 trillion. As a result, the United 
States, which entered the decade of the 1980s as the world's largest 
creditor nation, leaves the 1990s as the world's largest debtor 
country.
  This is no time to further liberalize trade policy that is hurting 
not only the textile and apparel industry but also steel, computers, 
and auto parts where net imports have climbed enormously. Last year, 
all of manufacturing lost over 340,000 jobs.

[[Page 26774]]

  Mr. President, when I became a United States Senator, one of my 
pledges to the people of Maine was that, and continues to be, that I 
will work to the best of my ability to ensure that their jobs are not 
lost because of actions taken by their government.
  The administration and proponents of NAFTA told us over and over 
again how good the Agreement would be for creating American jobs. I now 
hear the same argument with this legislation and I want to say that if 
what has happened is considered good, then I could not imagine what 
poor trade legislation would do to the textile and apparel industry.

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