Canada, Mexico and the U.S.: One big economy

By Alfredo Peppard

It was Jeff Faux, author of The Global Class War, who turned on the lights for me: The idea that there is now a North American working class; one single economic entity, a single political entity, a new economically integrated international working class. In his book, Faux presents the most detailed analysis and criticism of NAFTA that I have yet read. The title says it all.

I have thought for years that the Mexican labor, which plays such a vital role in our economy, was part of the U.S. work force. Faux’s formulation based on the integration of the three economies deepens the analysis considerably. Because we are a unified workforce, we are also part of them. That is to say, not only is the repression and the indignities inflicted upon migrant labor in the U.S. our affair but also the repression and indignities heaped upon Mexican labor in Mexico.
We also need to defend our Canadian fellow workers in their struggle to maintain their social services in the face of enforced “free market solutions” and alignment with the American economic model. We need a labor environmental movement to stop the rape of North America in all three countries. But first let’s talk about the number one problem: Unemployment.

Unemployment, that killer of souls, is ratcheting upward in all three countries. Unemployment is the workers’ most deadly enemy. It destroys the economic foundations of his life. He can lose his half-paid-for car, his home, his family’s future.. So he has to put up with attacks on his humanity like urine tests, unpaid overtime – all the big and petty abuses that a worker must swallow to keep his job.

But the pundits tell us that a certain amount of unemployment is good for the economy. It certainly is if you’re an employer. You can then begin to run your company or companies in the way that is the most profitable for you, which is by fear. Fear of losing what little they have governs the workers’ every action. They must submit to speed-up conditions, lower and lower pay for longer and longer hours -- or end up unemployed, bankrupt, maybe divorced, and possibly homeless.
That is what the pundits mean when they say a certain amount of unemployment is good for the economy: it raises profit levels. And if you’re big enough and well enough dispersed through the economies of the three nations, say like Chiquita, or Ford, or W. R. Grace, you can exercise your ability to destroy people’s lives, rule them with fear while you despoil them of their valuable labor and lands at off-the-rack prices.

And you can do this only until simple arithmetic gets in the way The money to buy all the stuff that drives the consumer society is that which is paid out in wages. Unemployment goes up, wages go down, and the gross consumer dollar shrinks and is able to buy less of the products in the market, so they lay off more workers, close more plants, ruin more towns, destroy more marriages, and create more unemployment.

Now they can move plants, workers and commodities all over the North American continent in search of cheaper labor, less environmental protection, and lower taxes. However while the masters of the universe are doing all this and everyone up there is getting rich, it’s not working for the rest of us down here; the ship is taking on water faster than the pumps can handle it. You don’t have to be an economist to see that the ship of our economy is going down by the bow and it’s time to be thinking about lifeboats.

All the possible approaches have been tried over the years to avoid this outcome but here it is. The economies of all three countries are involved and the ruling elites of all three countries are reacting in the same way. They are all making us pay for the failure of their wonderful system. They are slashing our social services, paid for with our tax dollars, and giving those very same tax dollars to banks that are somehow too big to fail. Canada and the U.S. are engaged in a war in Afghanistan that can do no possible good for the citizens of either country. So instead of schools, medicine, education, and decent roads we get reports of how we’ve got them on the run and it will be over in just a few more months. Whatever happened to the “light at the end of the tunnel?”

In Canada the forests are going fast and the oil shale exploitation is laying waste to vast areas. And in Mexico it is business as usual; the anger of the lower classes is dealt with by naked force. In West Virginia the courts have ruled it is perfectly legal to remove mountain tops to extract coal. Even the mountains are not safe from contemporary global capitalism.

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