Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 13, 1993 TAG: 9311160271
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
On Tuesday, Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., whose vote on the free-trade pact had been up for grabs, said he would support NAFTA after calculating that more jobs would be created than lost in his Baltimore area district.
Clinton administration officials say they are pleased - and relieved - that business has begun to give lawmakers commitments that are crucial to the jobs issue that is at the center of the NAFTA debate.
``It is overdue,'' said William M. Daley, the White House NAFTA coordinator. ``It was frustrating at the beginning. . . . Members (of Congress ) were saying, ``Put some meat on those bones.' That's being done
now.''
Early in the debate, unions could tell Cardin and other lawmakers how many jobs had been lost over the past decade due, in part, to trade, Cardin said. But to vote for NAFTA, he said, he needed to hear more from the other side.
``I challenged business early on to come in with concrete numbers,'' he said.
He got specific numbers from Bethlehem Steel Corp., General Motors Corp. and McCormick & Co., the Hunt Valley, Md., spicemaker.
When Domino Sugar Corp. said Mexico's concessions last week on sugar trade saved the jobs of 700 workers in Baltimore, Cardin concluded the numbers justified a vote for NAFTA.
NAFTA's opponents put little stock in the promises.
``We're now in the Arpege stage of the discussions: Promise them anything,'' said Mark Anderson, director of the AFL-CIO's trade task force.
NAFTA, the free-trade agreement between Canada, Mexico and the United States, is very much an offspring of U.S. business, whose leaders and lobbyists worked with Bush administration negotiators for many months last year to obtain the best terms possible.
The Clinton administration counted on corporate America to help sell the pact to a resistant Congress but the push was slow in coming - in part because business leaders wanted to see whether they could accept President Clinton's environmental and labor side agreements.
``A lot of the business supporters of NAFTA have not gotten their employees and rank-and-file people to call and say they're for it,'' Clinton complained on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' on Sunday.
The leaders of the business effort to generate support for NAFTA say their campaign has gained momentum of late.
``In the last six weeks we've made remarkable progress,'' said Lawrence Bossidy, chairman of Allied-Signal Inc., who also heads USA-NAFTA, the chief business group behind the agreement.
Companies have begun churning out telephone calls and postcards to Congress. USA-NAFTA's television ads feature two of the country's business icons: retired Chrysler Corp. chairman Lee A. Iacocca and William Gates, the billionaire head of software giant Microsoft Corp. and the nation's most successful entrepreneur.
In the early stages of the campaign for NAFTA, companies did not want to talk specifics about jobs. Some officials said they did not want to make pledges they might not be able to keep. Some, such as Citicorp, said they don't know where jobs may be added. And many are still downsizing parts of their operations, making jobs a painfully touchy subject.
That is changing in the heat of the debate.
A recent survey by the National Association Manufacturers produced 230 declarations by companies that they would increase U.S. jobs, bring jobs back from Mexico or the Far East or keep their work forces from shrinking if NAFTA were approved.
The responses are concrete evidence that NAFTA will trigger job growth by lowering trade barriers in Mexico, said Jerry J. Jasinowski, the association's president.
The examples included big companies such as Chrysler, which said it expected to export 25,000 vehicles to Mexico in 1995 under NAFTA, enough to support 4,000 U.S. jobs, Chrysler said. Currently, all U.S. automakers combined ship about 1,000 vehicles a year to Mexico, according to the Commerce Department.
Another company responding was Plantation Foods Corp., a small turkey meat processor in Waco, Texas, which said it hired 40 new workers because of increased exports to Mexico. By 1995, that could grow tenfold, it said.
``I've never seen companies put together this kind of detail,'' said Jasinowski. ``I was a little surprised.''
NAFTA opponents are suspicious of the timing of these promises.
``If there were any basis for these kinds of claims, we would have heard them before,'' said the AFL-CIO's Anderson. ``If I were a member of Congress, I wouldn't stake my vote on that kind of assurance.''
by CNB