COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Why Should Mexicans Be Trade Pawns? : A NAFTA side accord that ensures them a livable wage would help Northern labor, too.

Ardent congressional boosters of the prospective trade agreement with Mexico and Canada are airing fears that if put to a vote now, the pact would die.

Discount some of these alarums as drum thumping to firm up support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, but these politicians--Ron Wyden of Oregon, Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey among others--are sensing a national uncertainty.

Economists stir the tea leaves and discern the outline of a convincing economic recovery, but popular confidence is frail. Amid such uncertainty and the ravages of prospective military base closures, who wants an agreement that presages the departure of yet more jobs to Mexico?

Disconsolate enthusiasts for the pact have been hoping that a marker put down by Bill Clinton in last year’s presidential campaign will revive their cause. To appease critics of the free trade agreement as negotiated during the Bush years, Clinton pledged that he would not sign legislation putting the pact into force until side accords addressing labor and environmental concerns had been added.

Parleys on these accords start this week between negotiators from the United States, Mexico and Canada, and pact supporters have been hoping that Clinton’s trade negotiator, Mickey Kantor, will emerge from the sessions with the encouraging news that he has won stringent safeguards. Thus bolstered, the pact would regain momentum.

Kantor, before a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the prospective negotiations, did not provide the requisite political theater. On the crucial issue of trade sanctions to enforce the side accords, he exhibited a marked lack of enthusiasm.

Such prudence doubtless stems from the fact that the new side accords--particularly if the labor unions join environmentalists in pressing for more than verbal drapery--would undercut the substantive intent of the agreement, which is first and foremost to safeguard U.S. corporate investment in low-wage Mexico.

The strategy of Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas de Gortari echoes this intent. He has committed his country to an export strategy that has at its fulcrum pitiful and declining domestic rates of pay.

Mexico’s minimum wage has dropped by two-thirds in real value since 1976 and is now worth 55 cents an hour. Furthermore, Mexico’s constitution decrees that the minimum wage should be sufficient for one householder to support his family. Today, it takes three minimum wages to maintain a family of five at the poverty level.

A tri-national labor commission insisting under pain of trade sanction that each country uphold its own laws could play havoc with the Salinas master plan of 55-cent-an-hour (or even lower) labor.

Comparisons of labor productivity in U.S. and Mexican export sectors buttress the argument that not only is the Mexican minimum wage in breach of that nation’s own laws, but it represents just the kind of affront to fair trade and to the interests of North American workers that the side accords are intended to repel.

As Richard Rothstein describes in an excellent briefing paper on trade policy and labor rights from the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, released last week, there is a formal tradition (debauched in practice, of course) of the United States demanding fair labor standards from trading partners. Whether or not NAFTA goes through, the labor movement in the United States should be pressing such standards, given the de facto trade accord that has already seen the flight of jobs south with 500,000 toiling in the maquiladora assembly plants there.

A side accord could also sabotage the keenness of investors to take advantage of Mexico’s lax environmental regulations. Fair standards could require that products be scrutinized in terms of manufacturing process, which might include dumping toxic waste in a stream--permissible under NAFTA but illegal in the United States.

Defenders of the pact argue that the forceful application of such standards would constitute an intrusion into Mexico’s sovereignty. Given the flouting of such sovereignty by U.S. bankers and trade negotiators in economic policy, copyright and intellectual property law and so forth, such protestations are laughable.

The last thing the business promoters of the trade pact (on either side of the border) want is any improvement in Mexican wages, labor standards and environmental regulation. But for foes of the low-wage, environmentally degraded path, the battle over the pact and the side accords now offers an opportunity to strike at the very heart of the corporate premise that economic prosperity and profits derive from a labor force compelled to work for 55 cents an hour.