Water flows downhill
As do wages, benefits, and job security in the "free" market world
by Geov Parrish

For the last several months, U.S. media reports have been trickling in over the crisis in Mexico's maquiladora system. Since the admission of China to the World Trade Organization last year, companies have been leaving Mexico's U.S. border region en masse, opening plants again in China and in other low-wage countries in Southeast Asia, Central America, and even Eastern Europe and West Africa. Many more companies are feared to be readying a move, and still others have used the threat of moving to demand wage concessions from workers and tax and regulatory concessions from the Mexican government. The general tone of these articles has been bemusement: "Ha, ha, Mexico. You thought you were going to get rich by undercutting wages. Now the same thing is happening to you. Ha, ha, ha."

It is, unquestionably, ironic. What is now happening in the six Mexican states that border the U.S. is exactly what has happened in the United States and Canada since the passage of NAFTA in 1994 -- both in terms of the mass exodus of manufacturing jobs and the declining wages, benefits, and job security of the jobs that remain. But the fate of the maquiladoras is also likely to be, in time, the fate of many American workers as well; it is a harbinger not simply of America's economic past, but its future.
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