CWA President Shelton: Trump's New NAFTA Plan is All Wrong. Here's How to Fix It.

In an op-ed published on CNBC.com, CWA President Chris Shelton made the case for why Trump's new NAFTA plan is all wrong and laid out specific components of what a better NAFTA would look like:

The Trump administration's newly released objectives for renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are more of the same failed policies we've seen from decades of bad trade deals.

The new provisions look all too much like ones included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Trump criticized throughout the election season.

Instead of putting together a new NAFTA deal that puts workers, consumers, and communities first, these latest objectives largely replicate the problems from the old one, from encouraging off-shoring of jobs to maintaining Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) that allows investors in other countries to challenge U.S. laws and bring claims against our government for following those laws.

And, rather than adopt strong labor and environmental provisions that would actually raise wages and standards for workers in all three countries, the plan includes the same failed labor and environmental provisions included in the TPP and previous deals. That means that labor violations – like wage theft, excessive forced overtime and even child labor violations - can't be addressed unless they are committed "in a manner affecting trade," an impossible standard to meet.

Trade deals like NAFTA have been nothing but a string of broken promises for working families. The 200,000 jobs NAFTA was supposed to create instead morphed into 700,000 jobs lost and stagnant wages for the jobs that remained.

Here's what a better NAFTA looks like.