With the unemployment rate climbing to 5.6 percent, many students desperately scramble to find employment upon graduation. While it is not the exclusive reason for unemployment, many students are failing to connect the level of employment with United States trade policy initiatives, including the recent passage of Fast Track Trade Authority by the George W. Bush administration.

Most recently, the Bush administration, with a divided Congress, has been able to push its free trade agenda on the American people. The passage of Fast Track Trade Authority allows trade agreements to move through Congress with little opportunity for debate and no opportunity for modification. Essentially, Congress is only able to vote on the final agreement, limiting their ability to inject worker and environmental protections. It is critical that students understand the effect this bill will have on the American people and the possible ramifications it will have on our future employment opportunities.

The Fast Track bill passed quietly this summer beneath the veil of our nation’s current infatuation with foreign policy. Fast Track, which is essentially an extended arm to facilitate agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), aids powerful corporations in attaining cheap labor, lowering standards globally for workers’ rights, public health, consumer rights and the environment.

We need only to look at the effects NAFTA has had on American jobs since its enactment in 1994 to catch a glimpse of the effects of unregulated trade authority. According to an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study, “NAFTA at Seven,” the United States has lost 766,030 jobs as a result of NAFTA, while Canada has seen 276,000 jobs disappear. These layoffs are forcing more unemployed manufacturing workers into the service industry, leading to an average 23 percent decline in wages. This has particularly drastic impacts on the 73 percent of the American workforce without a college education.

When the Clinton administration enacted NAFTA in 1994, it promised unparalleled growth in Mexican industries and the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. According to the EPI, these promises are unfulfilled. More than one million Mexicans work below the minimum wage of $3.40 a day than before NAFTA, and since 1994 more than 8 million Mexicans have been pushed out of the middle class and into poverty.

NAFTA has also had a detrimental impact on workers’ rights to organize, according to a recent study by Cornell Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner. Corporations use NAFTA as a coercive tool, instilling worker passiveness by threats of plant closures. Since NAFTA went into effect, 68 percent of employers in manufacturing, communication and wholesale/distribution threatened to move all or part of the plant during union organizing drives. The actual number of plant closings is triple the rate found by researchers who examined post-election plant closing rates in the late 1980s, before NAFTA took effect.

Unregulated free trade has also had a devastating impact on American agriculture. Since NAFTA went into effect 33,000 small farmers in the US have gone out of business. This figure is more than six times the pre-NAFTA rate. In addition, between 1995 and 2000, the prices U.S. farmers receive for corn declined 33 percent, 42 percent for wheat and 34 percent for soybeans.

Fast Track trade authority will only extend the impacts of NAFTA. This bill, for the first time, actually prevents politicians from including enforceable workers’ rights or environmental protections in future trade agreements.

The passage of Fast Track authority is outrageous. It shows our president is merely pursuing a policy that protects multi-national corporate interests at the expense of American workers, the environment and domestic manufacturing jobs.

-The writer is a graduate student in the School of Political Management.