“NAFTA Sucks”: In New Video, UAW President Shawn Fain Calls for an End to Broken Trade Deals

DETROIT, MI – In a new video, UAW President Shawn Fain shares his experience as a young electrician in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1992 and how trade policy won his vote in that presidential election.

The new video, “NAFTA Sucks,” is available here, and the media is invited to use the footage.

The lesson for working class politics today is clear: working people need an alternative to the free trade disaster that has wrecked blue collar communities across the country and driven a continental race to the bottom that has hurt American and Mexican autoworkers alike.

The UAW has called for a renegotiation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which has not stopped the bleeding of good auto jobs from Michigan to Tennessee and beyond. The Trump Administration’s expected auto tariffs could be a step in the right direction towards ending the free trade disaster inaugurated by NAFTA thirty-three years ago.

Full transcript available below.

NAFTA SUCKS

SHAWN FAIN: In 1992, I was a 22 year old apprentice electrician in Kokomo, Indiana watching the Presidential Debate between George Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.

During that debate, one candidate won my vote immediately.

They were talking about NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which Congress had yet to approve.

ROSS PEROT: “We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. You move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no healthcare – that’s the most expensive single element of making a car – have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money. There will be a giant sucking sound going south.”

My decision was made in that moment.

I saw the threat in my community. If corporations were allowed to kill good blue collar jobs in the Midwest to pay poverty wages to some poor Mexican worker, they were gonna do it.

And workers on both sides of the border would end up paying the price.

That’s why I voted for Ross Perot.

Let’s look at what has happened since NAFTA passed.

Over 90,000 manufacturing facilities have disappeared in the United States, wrecking communities, ripping families apart, and leaving workers on unemployment or struggling to survive on low-wage jobs.

Every plant closure is a bomb dropped in working class communities.

You can literally see the blast zones in Kokomo, Flint, St Louis, and beyond.

The Big Three automakers alone have closed 65 facilities in the past 22 years.

I would love to say today that things have changed, but as we’re talking right now, more work is being shipped out of the country, and more jobs are being lost or are in jeopardy of being lost.

Stellantis has laid off thousands of workers at Warren Truck while the trucks they use to build are being made in Mexico.

John Deere, Mack Trucks, and many other companies are relocating work to Mexico right now, all in an effort to drive a race to the bottom.

Economists and talking heads want to say that tariffs are bad for the economy.

You know what’s bad for the economy?

Letting corporations ship jobs to other countries where workers make $3 an hour so the company can sell a truck for $100,000 and pocket the savings.

While American workers and Mexican workers scrape to get by.

Tell the workers who used to work at Lordstown, Ohio that our trade system is working.

Tell it to workers at Romeo Engine.

Or Baltimore Transmission.

Or Cleveland Casting.

Or Twin Cities Assembly.

Or Oklahoma City Assembly.