From Public Citizen Archive

Here is our initial 14-page analysis of the NAFTA 2.0 text, following up on the statement from Sunday night. We have reviewed how the text measures up to the changes to NAFTA that Public Citizen and many other progressive organizations have long demanded. After some digging, which has been exhausting giving the 900 pages of text and annexes, we have boiled down whole chapters into bulleted highlights and lowlights and assessed whether demands are met or there are mixed outcomes or it’s too soon to know or there’s been a fail. 

Overall, the NAFTA 2.0 text reveals a work in progress with some improvements for which we have long advocated, some new terms that we oppose and more work required to stop NAFTA’s ongoing job outsourcing, downward pressure on wages and environmental damage.

The new text isn’t a transformational replacement of the entire corporate-rigged U.S. trade agreement model that NAFTA launched in the 1990s. But at the same time, in key respects, this deal is quite different from all past U.S. free trade agreements. The revised deal could reduce NAFTA’s ongoing job outsourcing, downward pressure on our wages and environmental damage if more is done to ensure the new labor standards are subject to swift and certain enforcement, and some other key improvements are made. There’s a ways to go between this text and congressional consideration of a final NAFTA renegotiation package in 2019.

Important progress has been made with the removal of corporate investor protections that make it cheaper and less risky to outsource jobs and a major reining-in of NAFTA’s outrageous Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals under which corporations have grabbed hundreds of millions from taxpayers after attacks on environmental and health policies.