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Nancy M Dewendt, Letter to the editor Washington Post (8/12/97)

NAFTA didn't used to be much more than just a word to me. All that changed in May. That's when more than 400 co-workers and I at Swigline Staplers in New York found out that our plant was being moved to Mexico after 70 years in Queens.

We are the faces behind the NAFTA statistics The Post wrote about in its July 16 editorial "NAFTA at Three." Our futures have been ripped out from under us. Our hopes of building better lives for our children have been stolen by a greedy corporation. The odds of finding new jobs like these -- that pay us $11 an hour with health insurance and pensions -- are extremely low.

Swingline is already making a good profit, but it's not enough for them. NAFTA makes it easy for companies to more across the border and exploit Mexican workers earning $4 a day. But the money they save won't mean cheaper staplers; it will go right into Swingline's pocket. Last year the CEO of Fortune Brands, which owns Swingline, made $3.6 million.

Shouldn't NAFTA be designed to bring the wages of Mexican workers up, rather than drive our wages down and our jobs across the border? At $4 a day, Mexican workers don't have the money to buy our products, which is what I thought "trade" was all about.

It's obvious to me that NAFTA is not for working families no matter how many times the president or Congress or business leaders try to convince us it is. It's designed to make corporate executives and stockholders richer at the expense of workers on both sides of the border.

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