A multi-cultural program that examines news events and issues that have a broad impact on New England's minority communities. The program airs Sundays, from 11:30-12:00 p.m., and is hosted by Byron Barnett
Air Date: February 15, 2009
Host: Alberto Vasallo
Guests:
Arthur MacEwan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Professor Richard Freeman, Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Arthur MacEwan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Arthur MacEwan is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has been a faculty member of UMass Boston since 1975, and has taught courses on economic development, macroeconomics, and the economics of education, Latin America, American Economic History and Marxist economics. Professor MacEwan received his B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago, his M.A. from Harvard and a PhD in economics from Harvard. His more representative books are "Neoliberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets and Alternatives for the 21st Century" and "Instability and Change in the World Economy", and " Debt and Disorder: International Economic Instability and U.S. Imperial Decline".
Professor Richard Freeman, Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Professor Richard Freeman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published over 300 articles dealing with a wide range of research interests including the job market for scientists and engineers; the growth and decline of unions; the effects of immigration and trade on inequality; and income distribution and equity in the marketplace. He is currently directing the NBER / Sloan Science Engineering Workforce Project. The National Bureau of Economic Research is the nation's leading nonprofit economic research organization. Sixteen of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics and six of the past Chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER. The more than 1,000 professors of economics and business now teaching at universities around the country who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields. Urban Update has attempted to get the Mexican government regrettably to participate.
Today we'll be talking about NAFTA also known as the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was first of January 1, 1994 when NAFTA went into effect. NAFTA is a trilateral treaty that includes the U.S., Mexico and Canada. This treaty was designed to facilitate trade between neighboring countries, to develop better and more extensive markets, and to improve welfare among the three countries. NAFTA has been a recurring source of controversy because there are many who are Pro-NAFTA, but also there are those who are against it.
Official sources from the three governments, involved in NAFTA report that trade has tripled, reaching U.S. $930 billion dollars in 2008. The amount of employment generated since 1993 the amounts to 40 million jobs in the region. The trilateral agricultural trade has tripled, reaching $50 billion dollars. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that over the course of these 15 years have been lost in U.S. 1000.000 jobs. The U.S. corporations have settled mostly in Mexico (mainly manufacturing) to have a workforce that much cheaper than in the U.S. jobless has also left thousands of workers. In the case of Mexico companies that are established in that territory on exploit workers with long working hours and with a bad wage. In Mexico the labor force in the period 1994-2004 join 9.3 million people, 60% of there are in the informal sector. Other sources pointed out that the way to explain the phenomenon of losing jobs is because of the 40 million jobs that NAFTA has generated have been of low short-term contracts.
In the U.S. approximately 11.9 million undocumented Latin Americans, 59% of these are of Mexican origin according to Pew Hispanic Center. The Mexican people who migrate to the U.S. were mostly people from rural communities. The Mexican sociologist Rodrigo A. Medellin Erdmann from Harvard University, with 30 years in the Communion of indigenous Mexican entities, said that the effects on rural populations suffered following the signing of this treaty are disastrous this has been accentuated with the conditions of poverty and marginalization. Agriculture in Mexico fell 90% in a period of 14 years. This will generate 50% reduction of the workforce farmer in the field for 1991 had 9.9 million workers today there only 4.9 million.
Having experience of NAFTA for 15 years, President-elect Obama suggested that the treaty should be renegotiated, however the president of Mexico Felipe Calderon declare last Nov. 22 that would be a mistake to renegotiate NAFTA. He warned that if they are renegotiated Mexican migrants "are going to jump the river or the wall or whatever you put up".
