This is a manual for activists who wish to monitor the loss of manufacturing employment in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A number of activists have asked: why should we use our time and energy to collect data? Those of us already engaged in this activity have two answers: First, organizing people around "our right to know" is an important part of following up on our opposition to NAFTA. NAFTA was negotiated in secret. Information about its effects is often guarded by the government bureaucrats under the guise of protecting the competitive position of firms. Yet, we have a right to know what public policies do to us. Thus, a campaign to monitor the manufacturing employment impacts of NAFTA can also be a campaign to keep NAFTA from undermining our democratic rights.

Secondly, activists need to be involved in NAFTA monitoring because academicians and governments rarely collect statistics that are designed to find out how policies affect the lives of particular people. Since we are organizing ourselves in our workplaces and communities, we know best what kinds of information are important. During the NAFTA debate, many of us expressed concerns that NAFTA would harm our living standards by eliminating and moving jobs and causing us to either remain unemployed or work in lower paying occupations. Those in favor of NAFTA argued, on the other hand, that "free trade" would lead to job and income growth by increasing exports from the U.S. Every thousand dollars or so of exports was asserted to lead to a number of jobs for us.
Many economists and government officials simply assume that economic growth, including the growth of jobs, is the goal of policies like NAFTA. But if growth fouls the environment and the jobs either go to someone else or don't pay enough to live on, simply measuring growth won't tell us what we need to know. A former sheet metal worker who is now driving a school bus and working at McDonalds was asked recently by the New York Times about the growth of jobs that the government was reporting. "Yeah, there are jobs out there," he replied. "My wife and I have four of them." The point is that the kinds of information we collect should be determined by our own needs, not by some economic theory or the needs of the spin masters to make their politician look good.
It should be understood that the impacts of NAFTA will not be felt immediately for many of us. The task of monitoring right now is twofold. One is that we need to begin collecting information now so that we will have something with which to compare future impacts of NAFTA. Also we can begin looking for individual instances where factories move or where our employers threaten to move, which can be used in present organizing campaigns.

We have organized this manual to meet both objectives. We want to begin to establish information on trends in employment in key industries to meet the objective of creating base line data against which to measure NAFTA impacts now and in the future. We also are establishing a system of uniform reporting of current plant closings and layoffs that may be of immediate use in our organizing campaigns.