Capital’s relentless search for cheap labor constantly alters the flow of surface transportation in North America with widespread consequences. The end-of-century deindustrialization of the United States and importation of cheap commodities from the Far East through the West Coast reversed historical east-west transportation patterns and established Los Angeles and Long Beach as the largest ports in the nation. To minimize transportation costs, which for many products are higher than the cost of production, intermodal transportation of containerized imports was developed. Manufactured goods are packed into mobile shipping containers at factories in the Far East and travel by ship, train, and truck to distribution centers and, ultimately, consumer outlets across the United States. Currently, intermodal transportation of cheap imported commodities is the lifeline of the American economy. In 2004, the Port of Los Angeles processed 7.3 million container units and Long Beach handled 5.8 million. These two ports alone accounted for 68 percent of the West Coast total and are, by far, the largest employers in California. U.S. workers, who have seen so many lucrative manufacturing jobs moved overseas, assumed that import transportation and distribution jobs could not be offshored and were, therefore, relatively secure.
Current transportation trends are proving labor’s assumption to be dead wrong. Sparked by organized resistance and wildcat actions by workers against falling wages and deteriorating working conditions at America’s ports and on the nation’s highways, the flow of container traffic is being shifted to a south-north orientation. By leveraging both the U.S. and Mexican governments and taking advantage of the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), big capital is developing container terminals in Mexico and using that country as a land bridge and labor pool to deliver shipping containers to destinations in the United States at discount prices...
Like the railway, the largest NAFTA highways converge and cross the international border at Laredo. In Mexico, the NAFTA highways are part of the Federal Highway System, while in the United States they represent some of the most heavily traveled sections of the Interstate Highway System, most notably, I-35 which runs through the center of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas and has been dubbed the “NAFTA Superhighway.” The proposed NAFTA corridors, which are in the promotional and pre-construction stage, will dwarf the capacity of the existing NAFTA highways and railways. To assess the economic and environmental impact of the NAFTA corridor system, the size of the proposed corridors and the volume of traffic they are slated to carry must be considered.
A Look at the NAFTA Corridors
Although I-5 and I-15 originating in Tijuana and serving the western states, I-19 connecting Nogales and Tucson, and I-10 that serves Ciudad Juárez/El Paso and provides an essential east-west link in the system, are all important NAFTA highways—the two priority segments of the NAFTA corridor system in the United States are the I-35 Corridor and the proposed I-69 Corridor both of which will originate in Laredo and carry NAFTA freight all the way to the American Midwest. When the I-35 Corridor is completed it will extend 1,600 miles north to the U.S./Canada border. Along the route it will serve San Antonio, Austin, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas City, Des Moines, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Duluth. The proposed I-69 Corridor will also originate in Laredo but will head northeast, serving Houston, Texarkana, Memphis, Evansville, Indianapolis, and Lansing to the U.S./Canada border at Port Huron, a total of approximately 2,100 miles. Promoters of the NAFTA corridors tout the system as the largest engineering project ever undertaken in U.S. history. What they fail to publicize, however, are the economic costs of the system and how the massive project will alter the landscape and environment of America forever. These undeclared consequences, however, will be calamitous:
Land Consumption: The NAFTA corridors will be up to 1,200 feet wide with separate lanes for passenger vehicles (three in each direction) sandwiched between truck lanes (two in each direction). The corridors will also contain six rail lines (three in each direction): two tracks for high-speed passenger rail, two for commuter rail, and two for freight. The third component of the corridor will be a 200-foot-wide utility zone. To accommodate the railways and underground utilities, the corridors will run at grade level and will require extensive bridging at crossovers and intersections. The current estimate is that a typical corridor section will require 146 acres of right-of-way per mile, making the anticipated land consumption for the NAFTA corridors 584,000 acres in Texas alone (For a detailed critique of the Trans Texas Corridor Plan see (http://www.corridorwatch.org).) Total land consumption in the United States for the NAFTA corridors could exceed 1 million acres. Since the corridors are going to be routed through rural areas, this means they will consume a total area of agricultural land and open spaces almost as large as the land area of the state of Vermont.
Pollution: The heavy traffic on the NAFTA corridors will produce unprecedented pollution...
Economic Costs: Based on the estimated construction cost of $31.4 million per mile, the 4,000-mile Texas sections of the NAFTA corridors will cost $125.5 billion, not including right-of-way and miscellaneous costs. Adding in right-of-way costs of $11.7–$38 billion and miscellaneous costs of $8–$20 billion, the estimated total outlay for the NAFTA corridors in Texas ranges from $145.2 billion to $183.5 billion...
The Privatization of the Mexican Economy
Traditionally, the Mexican economy was ruled by the constitutional principal that Mexican land and its fruits belonged to Mexican citizens, but the principal of national sovereignty ended when the IMF and World Bank imposed extensive privatization programs and opened Mexico to foreign investors in the wake of the debt crisis in 1982....
Clearly, a titanic labor struggle lies ahead. The governments of both Mexico and the United States have been complicit in the sustained war on the workers that capital has been waging relentlessly for the last three decades. Undeniably, both the U.S. and Mexican labor movements have suffered serious setbacks under NAFTA. But the offshoring of U.S. production and transportation jobs and the wholesale exploitation of Mexican workers are just one facet of global capital’s assault on international labor and must be considered in that context...