Ross Perot on Jobs 1992 & 1996 Reform Party Nominee for President

Train our workforce better to beat foreign competition

A better-prepared workforce means higher productivity. Higher productivity results in a lower unit cost to manufacture an item. Lower costs increase the likelihood of successfully competing with products manufactured overseas. This leads to higher sales, which results in higher profits. Everyone wins-labor, management, stockholders, the government, and the dollar.

Mexican unions are beholden to one-party government

US farmers & ranchers will lose out to Mexico & Canada

The US citrus industry will also suffer under NAFTA. The US must immediately cut its tariffs on the import of frozen concentrated citrus from Mexico in half. In contrast, Mexico only has to phase out its 20% duty on imports of US citrus over an extended period of time. Florida’s citrus industry will be devastated.

NAFTA also exempts Mexico from the US Meat Import Act, while giving Mexico unrestricted access to US and Canadian feed grains. The result will be a massive shift of the US beef industry to Mexico as investors rush to take advantage of cheap wages, low safety standards, and lax sanitation practices. As a result, more American jobs will be lost.

NAFTA’s beneficiaries: US companies that move to Mexico

Indeed, the job shift is already happening. Today, more than 1,300 US companies are operating more than 2,200 factories in Mexico. They employ more than 500,000 Mexican workers. Most of these jobs were once held by American workers.

Today, thousands more US companies are being urged to move their factories to Mexico by the Mexican government, by banks that want a foothold in Mexico, and by junk bond dealers. If NAFTA passes, it will remove any final doubts for those companies.

A person can only wonder why and how a trade agreement so harmful to US interests was negotiated, and whose interest was foremost in the minds of the US negotiating team.

US is becoming a nation of hamburger flippers

How can Congress consider NAFTA, which will destroy urban jobs, at the same time that it is considering the Clinton Administration’s urban empowerment program, which will try to create urban jobs by spending $800 million a year of taxpayers’ money over the next 5 years to provide incentives for businesses to locate in urban areas?

Jobs lost to NAFTA are not replaced at same pay

In study after study, the US Department of Labor has found that displaced workers have an increasingly difficult time finding new jobs. The Labor Department reports that:
• The lower the skill of the displaced workers, the less likely they are to be re-employed ever.
• Blacks and Hispanics are less likely to find new jobs than whites.
• Women are less likely than men to find new jobs and more likely to drop out of the work force.