Sherrod Brown: “they are your typical working family, husband, wife, two kids. Both parents work in an auto plant, but they are still…”

“they are your typical working family, husband, wife, two kids. Both parents work in an auto plant, but they are still having trouble making ends meet. They dream of moving into a little nicer home and providing an education for their children, but it is hard to get ahead when they only make $40 a week apiece, barely enough to put food on the table and keep their kids in clothes. Rafael and Felicia Espinoza work for a large multinational corporation in a maquiladora plant in Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas. They make 90 cents an hour. For them, as for thousands of American workers with whom they compete for jobs, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, is a series of broken promises. I sat with Rafael and Felicia last Thursday afternoon in their ramshackle home in one of the hundreds of colonias that have sprung up around Reynosa in Mexico. They have no electricity, no running water. They have a propane tank to fuel their cooking stove, and they have hooked up a cheap little television to a car battery. They told me their roof leaked. They said they suffer in the winter because the house is poorly constructed. As we talked, their children, happy as most children are when they have loving parents, ran barefoot on the dirt floor. Rafael is a proud man, but he worries about the future because a kilogram of chicken costs up to 30 pesos, about 10 percent of his weekly wage.”