As seen by people like the protesters chasing Secretary Daley, there are neither new jobs nor bigger paychecks. For many, wages are frozen or even cut by a company threat to move to Mexico.

Statistically, U.S. wages have decreased 3 percent in 10 years
when adjusted for inflation. A family which used to be able to meet basic needs and take a vacation every year now finds itself dependent on two salaries and more working hours, and still has difficulty meeting the cost of essentials – food, utilities, insurance, transportation. This is as true in Mexico as in the U.S., except the gap in purchasing power is far greater for the Mexican family. Research by the National Association of Commercial Enterprises in 1996 showed that consumption of basic foods in Mexico had declined 29 percent in 18 months, with the price of beans increasing 240 percent, edible oils 70 percent, pasta 102 percent. Government reports indicated that 158,000 children under age 5 were dying yearly of diseases associated with malnutrition. As more than 28,000 businesses went bankrupt, a member of a national union said wages had fallen 35 percent over five years from 1993 to1997.

For Enrique Rivera, the 1994 peso devaluation meant that he couldn't afford to buy the material to make muchilas (shoulder bags). "I used to get the basic materials from the U.S. and Taiwan, costing $5 a bag, which I sold for $10. Now the price increases every month. It costs $10 to make the bag but there is no market to sell at $20. People come asking for used bags or for me to repair their bags."

Street markets were full of cheap imports. He let three workers go. His sewing machines were idled. He sold sandwiches for awhile, then found work with a messenger service to support his wife and four teenagers.

David Francis of the Christian Science Monitor wrote last May that in industrial nations, "corporate stocks have risen $7 trillion in value since last October." But such prosperity eludes families and individuals in the U.S. who can't even afford health insurance, some 41 million people.

Several hundred thousand U.S. jobs have been lost during the 1990s period
of free trade with Mexico and Canada. The AFL--CIO claimed a loss of 220,000 to 420,000 jobs by 1997, while the Department of Labor certified that 214,902 workers had lost their jobs by December, 1998, due to NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), which took effect in 1994. Accounting for new jobs created as a result of NAFTA has been elusive. Perhaps half a million new jobs emerged in the U.S., but Public Citizen Global Trade Watch claims they are not due to NAFTA and reports that Daley's Commerce Department canceled its survey of companies before 1997 because so few jobs could be attributed to NAFTA. From California to Massachusetts, business and government claim that there are more export dollars and better productivity, but not more jobs. For example, as of 1997, Pennsylvania was one of the top 10 states to have increased exports. However, it is also one of the top five in certified loss of jobs, according to statements by researcher Paul Kengor of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.

Two hundred workers were fired when Swingline Staple closed its Long Island City, N.Y., factory in mid-1997, moving production to Mexico. One Swingline employee, Nancy DeWent, a single mother of a 9-year-old boy, had been with the company for 20 years and was earning $11.58 an hour. She is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor saying, "I don't know what I'm going to do--they've taken just about everything away but my pride."

Mattel, the toy maker, claimed in 1993 testimony before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade that NAFTA would have a very positive effect on its more than 2000 U.S. employees. But in 1995, the Labor Department certified that 520 workers from Mattel's Medina, N.Y., facility were laid off due to increased company imports from Mexico.

Hundreds of accounts such as these add up to the enormous job loss.
In the international picture, China keeps export prices low by using prison labor, a practice that has also become a growing trend in the U.S. Thousands of young women in China, Bangladesh, Thailand, Burma, the Northern Marianas, migrate to work in factories where they experience terrible working conditions and even worse living conditions in residential dorms.

In 1996, in an address to Maine Business for Social Responsibility, CEO Bruce Klatsky of Phillips-Van Heusen offered a reason for locating U.S. factories overseas: "Why are we in places like Honduras? To stay competitive. ... We must manufacture in this country or our American associates will suffer and so will business."

Likewise, when Allied Signal CEO Lawrence Bossidy was asked by CNN anchor Lou Dobbs in 1993, "Do you think jobs will move to Mexico [under NAFTA]?" he answered that he thought the jobs had already moved. Less than two years later, according to a CovertAction Quarterly report, Allied Signal workers in Ohio, Texas and North Carolina were certified as displaced by the company's move to expand its Mexican plants.

The lines that connect globalization to the local market are complex. Each trade agreement overrides national legislation, requiring that laws interfering with implementation must be changed or eliminated. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a global trade body which grew out of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). It makes legally binding agreements and mediates disputes over trade barriers. According to a Public Citizen Global Trade Watch report, there has already been a WTO ruling that forced the U.S. to make changes in the Clean Air Act. And the threat of involving the WTO also convinced the U.S. to modify the Marine Mammal Protection Act and lift regulations protecting dolphins from tuna fishermen.

U.S. companies have also been on the offensive.
Gerber Products Company, for example, threatened a GATT/WTO challenge (through the U.S. State Department) to a Guatemalan law which prohibits pictures of babies on labels of baby food. Although infant mortality rates had dropped after the law passed and UNICEF had held the legislation up as a model, the Guatemalan government was intimidated into exempting imported baby food from its stringent infant health laws.

Loss of environmental and health protections has not deterred first world nations, who hope to initiate a "millenium round" of trade "liberalization" at a World Trade Organization meeting of ministers from 134 nations at the end of November in Seattle. Among items on the agenda may be proposals to open up global investment without local restrictions, eliminate tariffs on wood products and change policies in agriculture and intellectual property rights. According to a report from Martin Khor of the Philippine--based Third World Network, "Developing countries will be pushed to give up more and more of existing policies that protect their domestic economies, and allow foreign firms the right to take over their national markets. ... Developing nations would no longer be able to give preferences or protections to local investors, firms or farmers."

As South African president Nelson Mandela, asked at the February, 1999, World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "Is globalization only to benefit the powerful and the financiers, speculators and traders? Does it offer nothing to men, women and children who are ravaged by the violence of poverty?"