For Immediate Release

 
Contact: Heidi Mitchell/603-289-6333

Statement by Maine AFL-CIO President Ed Gorham on Sen. John McCain’s Trip to Colombia and Mexico

July 1, 2008 

Today Sen. John McCain leaves for a trip to Colombia and Mexico, demonstrating once again just how out of touch he is with working families in Maine and across the country.  Mainers have been wounded by bad trade deals over and over again, watching their jobs go overseas and their communities crumble, yet McCain continues to enthusiastically support the proposed U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement and celebrate the horrible effects of NAFTA. 

McCain has said that he would negotiate a “free trade” agreement with “almost any  country willing to negotiate fairly with us” - without any consideration of the harmful impact it would have on American workers or the unimaginable abuse of  workers’ rights abroad.  In Colombia, hundreds of trade unionists have been systematically murdered, tortured, kidnapped and threatened by paramilitary organizations.  Still, Sen. McCain plans to tout the supposed benefits of the proposed U.S.-Colombia FTA in the resort city of Cartagena, Colombia, while clearly ignoring the obvious threats that workers face each day.  

Maine has lost more than 25,000 manufacturing jobs since the passage of NAFTA. In Mexico, workers’ wages have stagnated in the 15 years since NAFTA went into effect, while income inequality has increased.  This is not unlike what we have seen here in Maine, where working people have borne the brunt of these failed corporate policies long enough.  Not surprisingly, the business leaders McCain will talk to on this visit have done very well under these deals.   

There is no question that we need a global economic outline that works for working people.  Workers around the world are in need of real change, not these same agreements that benefit the corporate elite at the expense of working families.  The next time Sen. McCain decides he wants to visit Mexico and Colombia, I invite him to come visit with workers from the towns of Mexico, Maine and Columbia, Maine and see what these dud trade deals have done to Maine’s working families. 

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