Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 13, 1993 TAG: 9311130050
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LON WAGNER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But Brock admits his role in sending letters to about 1,200 GE employees - those who are not union members - and making himself available to the media to talk up the virtues of the trade pact is unusual, at least for him.
"I don't ever get into politics, I don't even write letters to the newspaper," Brock said in a phone interview this week. "Why now? Because this issue has been misrepresented."
Brock's new visibility in the NAFTA debate is what some members of Congress say has been missing from the controversy: the voice of American industries that stand to benefit from the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico.
Brock said he believes trade unions, which nationally are NAFTA's staunchest opposition, have engaged in rabble-rousing, using emotional pleas to turn their members against a pact that would benefit American workers.
During the summer and early fall, a crucial time for the country's formation of its opinion about NAFTA, labor unions delivered blow after unanswered blow to the pact.
Now Brock has stepped forward with this argument: the United States is already losing low-wage, labor-intensive jobs, and those jobs will continue to leave the country even if the House of Representatives rejects NAFTA next Wednesday.
"People opposed to NAFTA are using the trend to fight NAFTA, and there's enough truth to what they're saying that they're able to get peoples' emotions up," Brock said.
"Yes, increased trade with Mexico will probably move some low-paying, low-transport, high-labor jobs to Mexico," he said. "What they don't say is it will probably happen anyway."
Gerald Meadows, a GE Drive Systems employee who is president of the International Union of Electrical Workers local 161, said he thinks Brock and other corporate executives want to use the low Mexican wages as "bargaining chips" when it comes time to negotiate salary increases.
"What about the people over here who do the assembly line work that can be done in Mexico?" Meadows said. "We can't just turn our backs on them."
Brock said NAFTA is an exporting issue not a jobs issue. Five years ago, he said, GE Drive Systems was "about out of business." Since then, partly because of $20 million in exports to Mexico last year, the company has grown.
Today, 60 percent of GE Drive Systems' business comes from exports, and the company has not laid off anyone in five years, Brock said.
"This negotiation, if it does not pass, sends a pretty clear signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. is not serious about competitiveness," Brock said.
by CNB