Parting Shots on NAFTA : Watch Mexico Dig In Its Heels : The allure of investment will keep the lid on worker rights--a long future for the status quo.

Supporters claim that Wednesday’s vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement is a contest between those who embrace the future and those who are trying to hang onto a rapidly disappearing past. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real issue is what kind of future we would like to see. Specifically, will the United States embrace real change, encourage worker rights abroad and ensure that expanded trade benefits the middle class at home? Sadly, NAFTA does none of this. Instead, the agreement locks in the status quo in Mexico--government policies that depress wages and reject labor rights--in a way that threatens wages and jobs in the United States.

The vote on NAFTA isn’t about whether there should be trade with Mexico--this continues with or without the agreement; it is about defining the rules of the game. This NAFTA encourages Mexico to become an export platform--low-wage workers producing for the global market--rather than a consumer society in which Mexicans can buy what they produce and what we trade. The Mexican government will continue to hold down wages to attract investment, and NAFTA provides important new guarantees for firms to take advantage of Mexico’s low wages. Ironically, these policies constrict the very consumer market NAFTA is meant to open.

The future that NAFTA offers is an intensified version of the global whipsawing of the 1980s, in which unrestricted access to low wages press down on gains that American workers have painfully built up over decades.

While NAFTA provides new protections for companies the day the agreement goes into effect, workers are left with vague promises about the “long term” from five ex-presidents, 300 economists and Henry Kissinger.

Proponents of NAFTA argue, in effect, that free trade and denial of worker rights are fully compatible. This policy not only looks backward; it also turns its back on the proud clamor for democracy in a post Cold War world. It is the status quo masquerading as the future.

For most of this century, sharing the gains of rising productivity has been the road to the middle class for U.S. workers. We can and should sign a trade agreement with Mexico that ensures Mexican workers access to that road so that U.S. workers are not pushed off of it. This NAFTA is not that agreement.