COLUMN LEFT : Free Trade: a Fast One on the Fast Track : A hasty deal would raise corporate profits on the backs of U.S. and Mexican workers.

In politics, the power to name is half the game. If you can control the label, you can dominate the debate. This month, for example, President Bush wants Congress to give him “fast track” authority to negotiate a “free trade” zone with Mexico. Who can oppose that? Can anyone prefer a slow track to a fast one, or shackled trade to free?

What’s the real deal? The President wants to limit public debate of a corporate plan to increase profits on the backs of workers in both the United States and Mexico. Free trade is not free. If it doesn’t go together with fair trade and livable wages, it costs too much. Without that commitment, a fast track is simply another way to pull a fast one on working people.

A U.S.-Mexico free-trade zone has surface appeal. Mexico is our neighbor and friend. We share a 2,000-mile border. The United States is Mexico’s largest trading partner; Mexico is our third-largest. In an era of trading blocs, a U.S.-Mexico-Canada common market would be larger than that of the European Community. Advocates say that free trade will help develop Mexico’s economy, provide the United States with a bigger export market, slow the flow of the desperate into this country.

Treacherous currents lie beneath this soothing surface. A free-trade zone might undermine workers in both nations. U.S. and Japanese multinational companies would move to Mexico to avoid tougher U.S. environmental, health and safety, and minimum-wage laws. Mexico would face a powerful lobby demanding low wages and no regulation.

This is not a false alarm: It is already happening in Mexico’s border export zone, where foreign corporations pay Mexican workers about 60 cents an hour. A flood of U.S. firms have moved to the Mexican side of the border solely to escape our labor and environmental laws. Until 1988, for example, 63,000 furniture workers contributed an estimated $1.3 billion to Southern California’s economy. When California required protection against the poisonous fumes of paint solvents, more than 40 companies moved south. Maquiladora factories in Mexico now make the furniture and produce the dangerous smog, which the wind brings back into San Diego.

Nor has this helped Mexicans much. Corporate pressure keeps wage rates in the export-zone plants lower than in the rest of Mexico. We export jobs and import goods made with poisons that we have banned, made by labor paid less than we allow working in conditions beneath what we accept. Mexico gets jobs without hope, a poisoned environment, an impoverished work force eager to come this way.

How then do we treat our neighbor? We cannot turn our backs on Mexico, build walls and arm the border. It is no answer to make our neighbor into a sharecropper, bound by debt and circumstance to labor in the field for the master in the big house. We must find another way.

In the European Community, workers are demanding a social charter that will set community-wide standards on wages and working conditions, on environmental and consumer regulation. At the same time, the EC is offering assistance to poorer countries like Greece and Portugal, helping them build the base needed to become true trading partners.

We should do the same with Mexico. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who many observers say was robbed of victory in the 1988 Mexican presidential election, has suggested that we negotiate a social compact with Mexico--minimum wages, health and safety guarantees, environmental and consumer protection, enforceable child-labor restrictions. We should raise their standards, not lower ours. Substantial debt relief would allow Mexico space to develop internally. If Mexican workers were to do better, we would export more. We would both grow together.

To achieve this, any trade agreement has to be negotiated from the bottom up. Working people need to have a seat at the table. The special interests of corporations have to be bounded by the common good of workers on both sides of the border.

Trust me, says President Bush, to take care of these concerns that we neglected earlier. This is the same President who held up the first increase in the minimum wage in 10 years, vetoed unpaid work leave for new parents, vetoed the 1990 civil-rights bill at the behest of corporations worried about lawsuits from women.

Trust him? Sure, and trust the tomcat to nurture the mouse. In an economy that has already lost more than 1.2 million jobs since August, Congress needs to assert itself before more Americans find themselves on the fast track to the poorhouse.