Part one of a three part series about how NAFTA has affected local communities. Although official classes wouldn’t start until Jan. 12, many students from Guilford returned to Greensboro early after winter break and spent their Saturday afternoon on Jan. 10 learning first-hand about how the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade policies have affected North Carolina.

Braving icy roads, snow, and freezing temperatures, students from the college joined a crowd of over 100 North Carolinians at an outdoor rally on the corner of Florida Street and Freeman Mill Road to demonstrate their opposition to NAFTA. Community members, workers, union activists, immigrants, elected officials, and students shared the stage to testify to the ways their families and communities have been affected by the trade agreement, which celebrated its 10th birthday last week.

The Cakalak Drum Corps warmed up the crowd, marking a steady rhythm on a ragtag collection of overturned buckets and barrels. The frigid air was punctuated at regular intervals with shouts of “No to NAFTA!” in time to the beating of the drums. The shouts attracted attention from the neighbors, and curious residents of a nearby housing project stopped by to see what the racket was about.

From the crowd, a middle- school boy who had wandered over with a friend shouted a question to the speaker on stage. “What’s NAFTA?” he asked. A middle-aged man to his left turned to the boy and gave him a short lesson in economics and the successes and failures of “free trade” as another speaker took the stage to tell his story.

“NAFTA is one of the worst enemies I have seen in my lifetime,” Joe Bowser, a member of the Durham County Commission, said. “I grew up in a place called Halifax County, Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. The people in Halifax County depended on textiles for their livelihood. There were thousands and thousands of jobs in Halifax County. My first job after graduating high school was working at J.P. Stevens & company. My father kept clothes on my back by working at J.P. Stevens & Company. Today there is no more J.P. Stevens & Company; they’ve taken the jobs abroad.”

Senior Caroline Kernahan has also seen her small mountain community affected. “In my town, most people worked factory jobs because farming is no longer lucrative,” she said. “Just in the last few years, all the major factories closed and moved elsewhere. Suddenly, there’s even less job security than there was before. A lot of people have to commute to another county to work after 20 years in the same job; now they have to learn a whole new field. I think in the next few years a lot of these people will leave Burnsville and move closer to work. There’s no reason to live there anymore.”

Sherri Thompson, an Ashe County resident, also stepped up to the microphone at the rally to talk about how her community has been affected by NAFTA-related job losses. “I live way up in the mountains and I work with dislocated workers; I have now for about 10 years,” she said. “I’ve seen those faces, these stories of desperation. I have seen people lose their homes, their cars. I’ve actually had people come and hang out at the JobLink [job training] center so they can hide their car during the day so just maybe the bill collectors won’t come and take it away.”

Claire Morse, Professor of Psychology, was one of the many other members of the college community present at the rally. “I went because the changes NAFTA has brought to people in this country and in Mexico are negative and threaten to get worse,” she said. “I support fair conditions for workers here and in other countries, and I want the world to have sustainable, non-polluting production of goods that workers who produce them can purchase and enjoy.”

Business advocacy groups like The Council of the Americas claim that NAFTA has been good for North Carolina. The Council, whose members include over 200 blue chip companies that represent the majority of the U.S. private investment in Latin America, has declared NAFTA an overwhelming success.

According to another NAFTA supporter, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service, North Carolina’s poultry and hog industries have been well-positioned to benefit from a number of free trade agricultural agreements including NAFTA. According to the Department, U.S. poultry exports to Mexico rose from 164,000 tons valued at $188 million in 1993 to 280,000 tons valued at $258 million in 2000. Under NAFTA, U.S. combined pork exports to Canada and Mexico have grown from 40,000 tons valued at $91 million in 1993 to over 178,000 tons valued at $332 million in 2002.

So why are so many North Carolinians finding themselves out of work? And why are so many out-of-work North Carolinians blaming NAFTA? “Since 1993, two million NAFTA-related jobs have been created in the United States,” Ray Riffe of the North Carolina AFL-CIO said. “Now that sounds like maybe NAFTA’s not such a bad thing. But that’s only half the story. You’ve got to look at these numbers, and look at how many jobs we lost in the last two years because of NAFTA. Over 200,000 of those jobs [lost] were from right here in North Carolina. About 170,000 were manufacturing jobs.

These were jobs where Americans went to work without a college degree.”

Plant closures in Gastonia, Greensboro, High Point, Lumberton, Mt. Airy, and many other towns and cities throughout the state have put thousands in community colleges retraining for jobs, and pounding the pavement looking for manufacturing jobs that no longer exist. In Robeson County 8,170 people lost their jobs between 1995 and 2003 as a result of industrial layoffs and closings.

Because federal statistics no longer separate NAFTA- related job losses from other trade-related job losses, it can be hard to chart exactly what percentage of recent closings and layoffs can be attributed to NAFTA, and which are the results of other trade agreements. Robert Williams, Voehringer Professor of Economics , says that NAFTA is not entirely to blame for the job losses experienced in the rural areas of the state. “The free trade area with Mexico and Canada is not the cause of job loss in the manufacturing sector here [in North Carolina],” he said. “It is low labor costs in other parts of the world, not just Mexico. In textiles and apparel, the competition is not just in Mexico but also in Asia; China is a bigger threat than Mexico.