Cameron Harrison at People’s World reports the United Auto Workers (UAW) is challenging the Big Capitalist-driven trade policies that have gutted American manufacturing and wrecked Working-Class Communities across the country.

In a new white paper: Trade and the American Dream: NAFTA, the USMCA, and the Future of the Working Class, the Union lays out its indictment of free trade policies and proposes an alternative: “NAFTA and the like are the social contract as written by multi-national corporations,” UAW President Shawn Fain said. “It’s time we rip it up and start over.”

The 36-page document, released as the six-year review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) approaches, argues the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was “one of the most dramatic Anti-Union Laws since the notorious Taft-Hartley Act of 1947” - and that its successor, the USMCA, has also failed Working-Class Communities.

Since NAFTA’s passage in the early 90s, the U.S. has lost more than 4.2 million manufacturing jobs.

Every plant closure, the paper argues, “is a bomb dropped on a Blue‑Collar Community.”

Studies show that rates of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and suicide all rise dramatically after factories shut down.

One recent study - Trading Goods for Lives - found that communities “more exposed to NAFTA experienced sustained increases in mortality.”

“The fact is NAFTA hollowed out U.S. manufacturing, driving a ‘race to the bottom’ - making it easy to move production for the U.S. market to Mexico, where companies can suppress wages and violate Workers’ Rights with impunity,” the paper states.

To Continue Reading This Labor News Report, Go To: United Auto Workers indict ‘free’ trade, demand pro-worker deal or none at all – People's World