Strikes, political pressure could obliterate jobs

A friend was reading the Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers Union Newsletter. The newsletter contains speeches given by union officers to the members, riling them up.

The newsletter says that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law by Bill Clinton, who claimed that it would create 200,000 jobs in the USA, and be an instrument for social change. It then states that jobs were lost. NAFTA did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do.

Then the newsletter rails against the US Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), and mentions that it was signed into law by the current president. It claims that instead of the 70,000 jobs gained that the president promised, the US has lost over 106,000 jobs due to KORUS.

OK, so unless my memory fails me, both these presidents were Democrats and both of them had power of the veto, and both of them signed trade deals into law that destroyed American jobs.

But what political party does the union rail against? Republican, of course.

At what point will the union members (not their leaders) recognize that they are being sold out by their union officers and the Democratic administrations? Who is getting rich by destroying union members’ jobs? Who is being held in economic slavery, trading their votes for unemployment checks, rather than being proud of having good jobs and making America great? You can’t get rich collecting unemployment checks.

If people, by strikes or by political pressure, force minimum and union wages above the cost of labor in foreign countries, then one of two results will occur. Companies shall contract for work in foreign countries, or will replace human labor with robots. Don’t think it will happen? Look at photographs of the auto assembly lines of the past with actual humans versus those of the few companies still in the U.S. with the majority of the work being done by robots.

Thomas Fancher

Moses Lake