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Farmers Union, AFL-CIO, Sierra Club discuss common NAFTA concerns

Members of the Farmers Union, the AFL-CIO, and the Sierra Club don’t agree on every issue, but Sarah Lloyd with Wisconsin Farmers Union says they need to work together on common NAFTA concerns.  WFU’s Special Projects Coordinator tells Brownfield, “We know we will be in trade.  There will be global trade, but we need to make sure that NAFTA is replaced with something that really works for family farmers, works for workers, (and) works for our communities.”

Lloyd says one common concern is the ISDS, or the Investor State Dispute Settlement provision, which she says takes away our sovereignty.  “Corporations can come in and say that a local law, a state law, a U.S. law perhaps protecting workers, protecting the environment, they can come in and sue the municipality, the state, or the nation for lost potential profit, and that’s not acceptable.”

Lloyd says meetings like the one in Kaukauna Wisconsin Tuesday are important to build coalitions and fight for better trade deals.  “The system is rigged against the people, so we’re going to have to do everything we can to come together, so it’s time to really find our shared values, and our shared values are fairness and justice, and we can have those in trade agreements that actually support real people.”

She says trade will happen, but it needs to be fair trade and not free trade.

David Newby with AFL-CIO says all trade agreements including NAFTA are about giving corporations cheap labor and the ability to exploit resources.  He says it was good to end the Trans-Pacific Partnership and would like to see NAFTA gone, too.

Devin Martin with the Sierra Club’s Wisconsin chapter says they opposed NAFTA when it began, along with other trade deals for giving corporations too much power, including the power to pollute.

Lloyd says trade agreements like NAFTA should be made with periodic reviews built in. She would like to see a 10-year sunset on any new NAFTA agreement.  She says the U.S. pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is proof that bad trade deals can be stopped.  She says, “It looked like it was a done deal, and there was quite a lot of citizen action from all sides against it and there you saw an instance where there was some political will and it was pulled back.”