USMCA was signed on Nov 30, 2018. Now we must stop it in Congress like we stopped TPP! Call and email your representative to tell Congress to Stop NAFTA 2 and create a new model of trade for people and planet!

The USMCA stands for the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It is Trump’s rebranding of NAFTA, the North American Free-Trade Agreement, and, in some ways also of the TPP considering much of the language in the USMCA parallels TPP language or is directly taken from the TPP. Also, like TPP, USMCA was negotiated behind closed doors and we knew very little about the negotiations until a preliminary agreement was reached and text was released on October 1, 2018. Spanish text, however, has still not been released which of course is a transparency concern for people in Mexico. During negotiations, over 1000 civil society groups outlined our negotiation demands for the new NAFTA and, comparing the text to these demands, we see that the agreement falls far short. Overall, the USMCA continues the same model as NAFTA and TPP that favors corporations at the expense of the environment and people’s well-being.

See our recent analysis and our original analysis, the proposed text, and how this compares to alternatives to and replacement demands of the New NAFTA and tell Your Members Of Congress to Oppose Trump’s justice-denying NAFTA Deal. Listen and watch interviews here. The true outcomes of NAFTA were very different from the promises made by lobbyists and politicians. The selling of NAFTA and the USMCA is very similar. See Public Citizen’s analysis of NAFTA 2.

The original NAFTA deal was a disaster for working class people around the continent. It was an attack on unions, family farmers, small businesses, communities throughout the continent, and on the environment and spurred a failed wave of corporate globalization around the world. The Trump administration, desperate for a win, has pressured Canada and Mexico into re-negotiations with the objective of completing these before the end of the year. On November 30, the leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada signed the renegotiated NAFTA, during the G-20 Meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This was the last date that the agreement could be signed by the outgoing right-wing Mexican President Peña Nieto before the new president, AMLO, took office.

The Trump administration is trying to rush NAFTA2 through Congress early in 2019 using the fast track process, which prevents Congress from changing the agreement in any way and forces an up or down vote on it within 90 days. This does not provide time for reading and understanding the agreement, much less holding debates on the content. We defeated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, now its time to stop the new NAFTA. Here is why we are worried:

Environmental concerns: See more from Sierra Club’s analysis

In May of 2018, 17 leading environmental organizations released renegotiation objectives that, if adopted, would create a North American agreement that protects the environment and our communities. The USMCA is far from this.  It has no enforceable environmental protections at all, maintains NAFTA offshoring of jobs and pollution to Mexico, encourages fracking, gives handouts to oil and gas companies, fails to regulate industrial chemical agriculture, and fails to even mention climate change.

In terms of offshoring, the current language of USMCA allows corporations to send jobs and pollution to Mexico where environmental and human rights protections are often lower. For instance, this new NAFTA would allow metal recyclers to send toxic used car batteries to Mexican recycling factories that do not have lead exposure controls and where workers have and continue to get lead poisoning.

In terms of energy, fossil fuel companies are really the big winners of the new NAFTA. Instead of moving North America towards renewables, USMCA locks us into oil and gas. According to Sierra Club the USMCA prevents the U.S. government, the Department of Energy, from determining whether gas exports to Mexico are in the public interest. This basically is an automatic guarantee of gas export to Mexico which will increase fracking in the U.S., expand cross-border gas pipelines, and create greater Mexican dependency on natural gas which has been the main contributor, way more than any other fuel type, to Mexico’s recent increase in climate pollution. Also in Mexico, the USMCA will lock in the government’s recent deregulation of oil and gas. Oil lobbied hard for ways to challenge the Mexican government if it tries to nationalize its energy sector again.

The USMCA also supports tar sands, though in a little different way from NAFTA.. NAFTA supported tar sands with the proportionality rule that locks in tar sands oil extraction in Canada. USMCA, on the other hand, supports tar sands by making it cheaper for oil companies to export Canadian tar sands through U.S. oil pipelines. So, although it looks like we may still win Keystone XL, despite Trump, this would make it harder to shut down existing tar sands pipelines like keystone phase 1, enbridge line 6b, line 5, and line 17 as well as stop new ones like the proposed Enbridge line 3.

Another environmental problem with the new NAFTA is the ISDS exception for oil and gas companies. Any oil and gas company that has, or may at some point have, government contracts for offshore drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, refineries, or other polluting activities in Mexico will be able to use ISDS courts to challenge public interest and environmental policies. This is a huge giveaway to fossil fuel polluters. The ISDS exception also applies to companies with government contracts in power generation, infrastructure, transportation, and telecommunications. So, while ISDS looks weaker under USMCA, it really doesn’t change that much. Most of the main industries that use ISDS will still be able to use it and there is even another loophole that could give carve outs to other industries.

In addition to ISDS corporations have a new way to challenge regulations in the good regulatory practices section that, according to Sierra Club, allows corporations “to challenge proposed regulations before they are finalized, and to ask that existing regulations be “repealed”…these deregulatory rules could make it harder to reverse the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks once Trump leaves office, which could extend his polluting legacy for years.” Learn more about regulatory harmonization here.

Two more environmental concerns of USMCA are one, that it maintains NAFTA’s buy american and buy local waivers–these give Canadian and Mexican industries equal access to US government contracts–and two, that USMCA reduces environmental protections that are included in the last four US trade deals. It does this by failing to reinforce a standard set of seven Multilateral Environmental Agreements that protect wetland ecosystems, arctic ecosystems, and endangered species and prevent overfishing, unnecessary marine pollution, and so much more. The deal includes standard enforcement language for only one of the seven MEAs, while using weak language for two and failing to even mention four of these essential environmental agreements.

The Trump administration has already left the Paris Climate Accord and pushed forward the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines despite widespread opposition, probable serious environmental damage, and violation of treaties with the Standing Rock Sioux people. NAFTA was never meant for us if it cares more about the profits of oil and energy companies than the cleanliness of our water and reversing the widespread contamination that drives climate change. We need international agreements that considers the protection of the environment and addressing climate change a priority and not a limitation. Additionally, the Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Measures Chapter must be dropped and reconsidered. We are concerned that these provisions will make it even easier to challenge food safety and animal welfare safeguards.

For more information visit Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Campaign and Friends of the Earth’s analysis on the USTR’s NAFTA objectives.

Food and Agriculture Concerns: See Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the statement of opposition from Family Farm Organizations for more.

NAFTA, as we know, was a disaster and things generally either stay the same or get worse under USCMA which is designed for agro-chemical corporations not small farmers, local food systems, or consumers. In Mexico, over two million farmers left agriculture because of NAFTA, mostly because agricultural export dumping, or flooding Mexican markets with corn, wheat, and rice from the US at below the cost of production. The USMCA ensures the continuation of this practice which, of course, is one of the main causes of Mexican migration and refugees to the US.

Incoming Mexican President, Manuel Lopez Obrador, along with more than 100 Mexican farmers’ organizations have come out with a plan to rebuild Mexico’s decimated food system. One of the main goals of the plan is self-sufficiency in corn, wheat, rice and beans by 2024. It supports a transition toward agro-ecology while barring GMO crops. This would almost certainly be considered trade distortion under USMCA and the whole plan for food sovereignty in Mexico could be derailed.

Another factor is that the USMCA, like the TPP, requires all countries to ratify the 1991 version of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, which prohibits farmers from saving and sharing seeds. Mexico ratified the 1978 version of that accord, which includes exceptions for small-scale farmers, but has declined to ratify the more stringent 1991 version. If this is required under USMCA, small farmers in Mexico will lose control of their seed to Monsanto.

As Food and Water Watch writes in their analysis, the USMCA “also has giant giveaways to the agrochemical industry that paves the way for unregulated gene-edited GMOs, rolls back Mexico’s regulation of GMOs, and lets chemical giants like Monsanto and Dow keep the data on the safety of their pesticides secret for 10 years.” USMCA is designed for agribusiness, not family farmers and consumers. Further, USMCA would allow corporations to interfere with food safety, chemical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, labor, and environmental regulations through new regulatory cooperation mechanisms.

Rather than creating enforcement mechanisms for food safety, labor standards, or environmental protections, the USMCA develops a state-to-state arbitration system that allows corporations to en

On the consumer side, USMCA does not require Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL), nor dolphin-safe labeling and makes GMO labeling more difficult. It would also make it more difficult to regulate and inspect foods, limiting inspections and allowing food that fails to meet US safety standards to be imported. According to Food and Water Watch the new text encourages the United States to accept the food safety rules in Mexico as comparable to domestic protections, and to accept imports from Mexico with less scrutiny than from other countries. USMCA is also bad for Canada’s dairy supply management system and many more things.

According to the IATP, the new NAFTA’s “Agriculture, Sanitary and Phytosanitary, and Service chapter objectives are the same as in the TPP. The elimination of Chapter 19 will ensure that dumping of commodities (illegal for industrial goods) occurs unchecked by countervailing duties. Most frustratingly, the objectives will do nothing to incentivize food production that will protect the livelihoods of farmers, the safety of consumers, or the health of the planet.” A trade model that guarantees fair and sustainable agriculture would protect small farmers by allowing and encouraging them to share and save seeds and simultaneously appropriately regulate agricultural biotechnology products.

Healthcare and Affordable Medicine

This is one of the worst new aspects of the USMCA. According to a letter from the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) and 28 groups representing patients, taxpayers, workers and health care groups, “the U.S. Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), if left in its current form, will keep drug prices high and out of reach of Americans.” The USMCA, like the TPP, would increase the cost of pharmaceutical drugs through intellectual property protections that go significantly beyond NAFTA. USMCA gives pharmaceutical companies at minimum 10 years of market exclusivity for biologic drugs and protects US-based drug companies from generic competition, driving up the price of medicine at home and abroad. Also see the recent letter from over 70 healthcare groups.

Labor, Wages, Worker Rights, and Migration:

Unions and working people have faced constant attacks from corporations under the NAFTA economic model that promotes a race to the bottom. Workers deserve fair wages, benefits, and protections and these should be guaranteed and made enforceable through any agreements made with Mexico and Canada. Union and workers from all sectors and nationalities must have a significant say in what is in any NAFTA re-negotiation as the original deal’s impact fell heavily on workers across the continent. Trade agreements should strive for gender equality in the workplace and increased job opportunities for the poor and communities of color. The rights of migrant workers must be guaranteed under any agreement and be accompanied by significant immigration reform that reverses the criminalization of immigrants and divisions of people along borders.

By design, the original NAFTA distorted power relationships in favor of global employers over workers, weakening worker bargaining power, encouraging de-industrialization of the US economy, and accepting widespread worker abuse in all three countries. According to the AFLCIO, 851, 700 US jobs were lost under NAFTA between 1993 and 2013. Others calculate more. NAFTA-displaced workers, especially from manufacturing, have had to accept lower paying jobs mostly in the service sector. Overall trade volume and corporate profits are up, but wages in all three countries have remained stagnant. Freedom of working people to negotiate and unionize is under constant attack, which has resulted in in decreased union density across North America. According to Citizen Trade Campaign, the new NAFTA “fails to include the critical changes necessary to protect jobs, raise wages, defend human rights.”

The USTR Labor Advisory Committee on Trade says that there are minor improvements in labor provisions regarding violence, migrant workers, wage-related benefit payments, and Mexico’s labor law, but, important weaknesses remain, including a footnote that makes it difficult to uphold international labor standards (footnote 2) and the absence of rules prohibiting abusive labor recruitment practices or requiring the payment of living wages. Most importantly, there are no labor-specific monitoring or enforcement provisions.

USMCA includes a provision that would require at least 30 percent of the labor used to build each car in Mexico to be completed by workers earning at least $16 an hour. That sounds good on paper, but according to USW President Leo Gerard, it is “too low to make a significant difference” in convincing manufacturers to keep their plants in the US.  He also suggested “making the wage standard a minimum, rather than an average, and suggested indexing it to inflation to ensure that the wage increases aren’t “meaningless.””

Without strong labor and environmental rules with clear and certain enforcement, Trump’s version of NAFTA will continue to facilitate the outsourcing of jobs, the suppression of wages, and the dumping of toxins. A NAFTA replacement without this fundamental fix is a no-go.

Visit Replace NAFTA’s site for more information on worker rights and the devastation of rural communities in Mexico that displaced thousands. Read the AFL-CIO’s demands for the NAFTA renegotiation and the USW labor Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations and Trade Policy’s analysis of the new NAFTA.

Trade Deficit:

According to the NAFTA at 25 report, a “$3 billion U.S. goods trade surplus with Mexico and a $31 billion deficit with Canada in 1993 (the year before NAFTA took effect) turned into a combined NAFTA goods trade deficit of $191 billion by 2017. This represents a 576 percent increase in the U.S. goods trade deficit with NAFTA countries in inflation-adjusted terms. Defenders of NAFTA try to distract from the large NAFTA trade deficit by touting the overall growth in trade between the U.S., Mexico and Canada, as if expanding the volume of trade is a goal unto itself. The relevant consideration is how NAFTA altered investment and production location decisions, which resulted in shifting trade patterns with negative implications on jobs and wages.

Rights of Indigenous Peoples:

Trump’s new NAFTA has no objectives that seek to guarantee and enforce the rights of indigenous peoples nor does it seek reparations or decolonization which need to be prioritized in any new trade deal. No government should be allowed to overstep the sovereignty and rights of indigenous peoples to free, prior and informed consent. Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination, lands and resources must not continue to be trompled over as they have for centuries. As some of the most marginalized in the world, bearing a disproportionate burden of a system that contains systemic imbalances between the enforcement of corporate investors’ rights and human rights, indigenous peoples’ rights must be central to any just collaboration between the North American governments.

Corporate trade and globalization are the modern manifestation of the colonial extractive economy that always goes hand in hand with militarization of indigenous, and black and brown communities. The Zapatistas who rose in resistance to NAFTA in 1994 said that NAFTA would be a death sentence for indigenous communities in the Americas. This has been true for so many. In their recent declaration the Zapatistas say that USMCA will “guarantee profits for the powerful and terror for everyone else.”

See our analysis for more ways in which USMCA continues US imperialism. For more information read UN Special Rapporteur Victoria Taulli-Corpuz’s report on the impact of free trade deals on the rights of indigenous peoples.

Transparency: For more information visit EFF’s Trade Transparency Recommendations.

The administration’s stated objectives with the NAFTA re-negotiation draw heavily from the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We do not want a trade deal that was negotiated in secret amongst hundreds of corporate advisors to be the model for the North American economy. There is no respect for the principles of democracy when the peoples of Mexico, Canada, and the United States are excluded from the decision-making process that will define our own lives. A trade deal for the people would publish the results of every step of the negotiations, would be transparent in the actors and stakeholders influencing decisions and inclusive in who may join Trade Advisory Committees, and would have a strong transparency enforcement and accountability mechanisms. To date, there is still no Spanish text of the preliminary USMCA.

Investor State Dispute Settlement: Also see the environment section of this page where we discuss ISDS specifics in USMCA.

The Investor-State Dispute Settlment mechanism (ISDS) has a proven track-record of attacking labor and environmental protections that do not benefit multi-national corporations. The ISDS has cost governments millions of tax-payer dollars that should be going towards essential public services. There can be no justice in an international dispute settlement system that is set up by corporations for their own benefit without public and democratic accountability. ISDS is not only a threat to our labor laws and environmental protections, but to a democratic government itself. For more information visit Public Citizen’s ISDS Resources Page.