First of all the main beneficiaries of the North American Free Trade Agreement will be Multi-National Corporations, or MNCs, such as Sony, General Electric, and Nestlé. Many times large corporations such as these are focused on profits rather than on helping employees achieve a better quality of life. Multi-National Corporations will be the ones most likely to see profits from NAFTA, and instead of using them to give lower level employees a living wage or benefits, are more likely to give raises to management and corporate leaders. According to Fortune.com, women make up fewer than 15% of corporate officers and fewer than 5% of CEOs in the Fortune 500. On top of this, approximately 80% of these women are white. This means that any benefit that NAFTA could possibly have would only benefit a very small number of mostly white women. The North American Free Trade Agreement will mostly only benefit Multi-National Corporations, which have very little women in upper management therefore making this benefit unlikely to help very many women. When compared with the various harmful effects towards women, it is clear that NAFTA harms a good deal more women than it will benefit in the long …show more content…
In both the US and Canada, there was a decrease in manufacturing jobs, which as I have said will unduly harm the women in these countries as they are the most likely to be laid off. It was also shown to have affected Canada harder than the US, with the loss of jobs being 26% and 6% respectively (Campbell 100). This is most likely due to Cananda’s economy being smaller than the US, and what is likely to happen to Mexico to a larger degree with its economy being smaller than either of the other two. This will harm Mexican women, who are used as an easy inexpensive source of labor, then discarded when the company no longer needs them or thinks that the women in these factories are more trouble than they are worth. Overall as evidenced by past free trade agreements, we can assume that this will have similar effects to the economy and therefore hurt the working class women of these countries, more than any other