A North American road to the middle class

Now that Canada has joined a revised North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), renamed the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), we must not lose sight of the central problem that any new accord must address: the outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to Mexico’s system of suppressed wages. There have been efforts by some to dismiss or downgrade this issue and by others to focus on less central concerns relating to trade with Mexico. Any new agreement that fails to directly and forcefully address this issue of labor rights will only lock-in the status quo for many more years to come.