[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 14873]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            DANGERS OF CAFTA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, the people of the Buckeye State of Ohio send 
their sympathies to the Noah Harris family as well and pray for him and 
pray for his relatives and pray for all of those who have lost loved 
ones on the American side, on the Iraqi side, and those who are in 
theater this evening.
  Mr. Speaker, I wish to dedicate my remarks this evening to CAFTA 
because the Bush administration cannot get the votes in this Congress, 
apparently, to expand NAFTA to Central America; and so they are now 
resorting to a number of myths in order to try to sell hard in these 
closing days. And one of the myths that they are talking about is jobs, 
and there was an ad in one of the newspapers up here on Capitol Hill 
today about blue jeans. And it is paid for by the very companies that 
are outsourcing our jobs and shipping them out to other places like 
Central America. And the ad gives us a really interesting choice on 
blue jeans. It basically says, do you want your blue jeans manufactured 
in the Dominican Republic, or do you want them manufactured somewhere 
in Asia?
  My answer is I would like them manufactured in the United States of 
America where they used to be, in New York City, in Lower Manhattan, in 
North Carolina, in South Carolina, in Mississippi where people would 
like to be making the very products that we buy.
  Interesting they do not even give the choice of manufacturing in the 
United States of America. That pretty much tells the whole story 
because workers in Central America make pennies, literally pennies. 
Largely women are sewing those jeans, and I have met some of them. They 
have to work 2 weeks, because their wages are so low, to afford one 
pair of jeans. And they make 400 to 600 pairs of jeans a day. Think 
about that. Think about who makes the profits off their sweat when you 
go to buy a pair of jeans.
  In El Salvador and Nicaragua, two of the countries where they want to 
outsource more of our jobs, women workers can be fired for trying to 
stand up and get a contract to earn a decent wage, to be able to work 
for something more than starvation wages, which is what they termed 
what they work for. They are intimidated in the workplace.
  In Guatemala and Honduras there are fines for anti-union 
discrimination, and you know what? Courts do not enforce them. Gosh. 
Does that shock us in Guatemala?
  In Costa Rica company unions, that means the one who runs the company 
or owns the company, replace really legitimate independent unions. The 
business roundtable who paid for this ad, and it is not cheap to put an 
ad in this paper, really ought to tell us how to create jobs in 
America, in the United States of America.
  Now, a second myth is labor rights. In fact, Ambassador Portman, the 
new trade ambassador, says expanding these trade agreements to Central 
America would provide the workers down there with the best labor 
standards of any trade agreements we have negotiated, except for one 
thing: he is totally wrong.
  The truth is that the current trade system we have in place with the 
Caribbean countries allows our government to rescind trade benefits. It 
has real power for any country that is falling short in its labor 
commitments. The labor provisions in CAFTA by contrast have no teeth. 
So Ambassador Portman says, you know what, maybe they do not have any 
teeth, though I do not admit that publicly, but I will put some U.S. 
taxpayer dollars on the table, $40 million, and we are going to try to 
give them to those countries in hopes that they will enforce their 
laws.
  Of course he does not say we are already giving over $50 million to 
all of those countries right now and they are not enforcing their labor 
agreements. They never have. Despite the current labor laws, all of the 
international reports show real enforcement of their laws do not exist. 
So why should we pass an agreement that undermines the Caribbean Basin 
Initiative Standards that helps to raise standards of living rather 
than lower them?
  Finally, democracy. That is the other myth. If we just pass this 
CAFTA, why the people down there they will have more democracy. In 
fact, Ambassador Zoellick has said that. But you know what? The record 
shows in these countries when there is this kind of deregulation, the 
neo-liberal model, what you get is more people being put out of work. 
NAFTA cut wages in Mexico; NAFTA has created over 2 million people who 
were pushed off their farms who come here as illegal immigrants, people 
who are not treated with respect on this continent.
  That is not the way to build friendships. You know what? In every one 
of those countries down there, in three of them no agreement has been 
passed; and in the other three, the agreement was ramrodded through in 
a very undemocratic way. We ought to begin democratically to treat our 
friends in Central America with the same kind of respect we demand of 
people here in the United States.
  It is time to turn back CAFTA, renegotiate it, and start building a 
middle-class standard of living on this continent again.

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