Visit to Mexico Confirms Gephardt Skepticism About NAFTA’s Benefits

On his way to the annual AFL-CIO meeting that just opened in Los Angeles, Richard A. Gephardt stopped off here and received a succession of small offerings from the world’s infinite reservoir of sorrow.

Gephardt, the top-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, spent Friday bouncing up and down rutted roads to meet with small groups of Mexicans who work in the foreign-owned maquiladora factories that have proliferated along the border.

There was the woman whose daughter was exhibiting signs of lead poisoning. There was also the man who was arrested while leading a protest against the dismissal of workers trying to organize a union. There were the stories of workers who had lost fingers, or even a hand, in an assembly-line speedup.

Above all, there was the exhausting daily struggle with grinding poverty in an economy that still pays what one woman bitterly called “hunger wages.” Most of the families who spoke with Gephardt, House Minority Whip David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) and the small delegation of union officials and academics accompanying them, live in ramshackle squatter villages where they have assembled shacks from mud and wood and the occasional brick; many lack electricity or running water.

In a simple one-room community center--where flecks of paint fell from the whitewashed ceiling like a gentle dusting of snow--the group heard from a woman named Claudia who packs audiotapes into boxes for an international company from 5:30 in the afternoon until 2 in the morning. For this, she earns 45 pesos a day, or about $5.40. To make ends meet, she’s been forced to remove her two teenage sons from school and send them to work in the factories as well. “I told the supervisors,” she said quietly, “it is not enough for us to make in one day what the workers in America make in one hour.”

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The story in Tijuana is not one of undifferentiated exploitation. At quitting time outside a gleaming new Samsung television assembly plant, several of the young workers said they were glad to be working for the South Korean manufacturing giant because the money was better than they could make in their villages to the south, if they could find work at all. It’s hard to see how Mexico would be better off without these plants, or, for that matter, the North American Free Trade Agreement that has encouraged their growth by ensuring access to the U.S. market.

Yet, the day’s conversations made it equally clear that here at least NAFTA has not fulfilled its promise of encouraging reform in Mexico. Toxic waste is still dumped at night in streams where poor families bathe; workers who try to organize independent unions are still as likely as not to find themselves out of work. High productivity in some of the world’s most sophisticated factories still hasn’t produced a living wage.

For anyone who believes the integration of the global economy is not only inevitable but also ultimately beneficial, it was a sobering day. For those who were already skeptical--a group that would include Gephardt and his delegation--the spectacle of a South Korean company hiring teenage Mexican workers at subsistence wages to assemble state-of-the-art televisions for export to the U.S. only confirms their worst fears. “Welcome to the economy of the 21st century,” the Missouri lawmaker said as he drove into the Samsung factory.

In an extraordinary act of rebellion against a president of their own party, Gephardt joined with Bonior in fall 1993 to lead the unsuccessful opposition to Clinton’s NAFTA treaty. Since then, the Democratic divisions over trade have quieted, but that truce may be about to end.

Clinton is pushing Congress for expedited authority to negotiate the expansion of NAFTA, first to Chile and then throughout South America. Congressional sources believe that Clinton wants Congress to grant him that “fast-track” authority by May, when he’s scheduled to make his first trip to South America.

As he toured Tijuana, Gephardt left little doubt that he’s dubious about providing Clinton such a sweeping writ, without guarantees that much stronger labor and environmental standards will be included in any NAFTA expansion. “I’m not convinced NAFTA is working,” he said. “You have to try to improve it, and you certainly don’t rush into other agreements with other countries and repeat the same mistakes.”

Few experts feel comfortable rendering a final judgment on NAFTA; though the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico has exploded since 1994, it’s impossible to separate the treaty’s effects from the meltdown of the Mexican economy in the peso crisis. What’s more certain from Gephardt’s trip is that the debate over Clinton’s free-trade agenda is likely to persist as a biting issue inside the Democratic Party--and one of the dividing lines as party insiders begin to choose sides behind Clinton’s potential successors.

With the last election just behind us, it is, of course, much too early for any rational person to be thinking about the election of 2000. But for those who are thinking about it nonetheless, this week’s AFL-CIO meeting in Los Angeles looms as something like the first scrimmage of spring training. On Tuesday, the union federation’s powerful executive council will hear from Gephardt and from Vice President Al Gore.

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Several Democrats are already believed to be mulling campaigns in 2000, including former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, and Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, who’s considering a gadfly candidacy from the left.

But most Democrats now consider the key figures to be Gephardt and Gore. Gore brushes asides questions about his intentions as premature, but if he’s breathing, he’s running. Gephardt says he won’t make up his mind until after 1998, but one close advisor said: “I think Dick wants to be president . . . and the chances of him running in 2000 are very high.”

History suggests that the chances of Gore winning the nomination are also very high. As a private memo Gore has read points out, in the modern primary era, the only sitting vice president who sought and was denied his party’s nomination was Harry S. Truman’s aged sidekick, Alben W. Barkley, in 1952. Money, endorsements and media attention all flow downhill for the incumbent veep.

Yet events could greatly complicate Gore’s path. Recession or scandal could engulf the Clinton administration--or singe the vice president himself. Alternately, Clinton might enjoy broad success with his centrist course yet still inspire a backlash from his party’s left.

Gephardt is the most logical champion to lift that banner. He’s careful not to criticize Clinton but also clear that he considers the president’s agenda too crimped. Asked if Clinton’s second-term priorities--balancing the federal budget, reining in entitlements, expanding free trade--are sufficient to advance sluggish middle-class living standards, Gephardt says no. He wants to talk about increasing public investment, pursuing a harder line on trade, deploying carrots and sticks to push corporations to raise pay for “workers who are creating value.”

Gephardt is a politician whose weaknesses are intimately connected to his strengths. At his best, he has a dogged capacity to enlarge the political debate beyond the deficiencies of government to the daily concerns of those who feel left behind by economic change. At his worst, he has a paleoliberal tendency to view politics as simply a process of mollifying interest groups--a blind spot that led him, fatally, to discourage Clinton from pursuing welfare reform early in his first term.

Gephardt’s criticism of NAFTA is likely to win loud applause from the union council Tuesday. But it’s anathema to another group that will gather in Los Angeles on the same day: a delegation of 16 high-tech executives from the booming Silicon Valley, meeting privately with Gore over dinner. Gephardt’s unmet challenge is finding a way to speak to voters who feel they are getting ahead in the new economy--like the Silicon Valley leaders (led by ace venture capitalist John Doerr) already flocking to Gore. If Gephardt can’t broaden his appeal beyond those who fear what the future holds, he will probably never sit in the Oval Office.

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Still, Gephardt’s skepticism about the brave new world of the global economy can be a useful corrective to a Clinton message now tilted too far in the other direction. Taking optimism to excess, Clinton now rarely even acknowledges that anyone feels left out by economic change. When the president visits Mexico in April, he’s likely to again accentuate the positive. He might offer a more balanced appraisal if he first follows Gephardt’s trail through the molar-rattling roads and precarious shacks clawed like scars into the hillsides of Tijuana.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space each Monday.