The coordinator of the Department of productive development of the PIT-CNT, Danilo Dárdano, said that the FTA “will leave several losers, in particular, the manufacturing industry, the metallurgical sector, plastic, textile, clothing and steel, among others.”
“If progress is made in this FTA, we are going to be left without the little national industry that still remains,” said the union leader.
However, the trade union center is not unaware that sectors that already export to China “will benefit more in their conditions to increase their sales, but that the increase in these productions will have a greater environmental impact.”
The union movement considers that free trade agreements with large countries, such as the United States or China, are “disastrous” for the Uruguayan scale of small production, and the country could “die with its eyes open.”
Dárdano said that if the agreement is finalized, medium and large businessmen will probably become importers, but small industrialists and workers will be left without work.
Alternatives
The PIT-CNT considered it essential to “open discussions” in which the government, businessmen and workers participate, to analyze if the only possibility is an FTA or if there are other formats of insertion and/or productive complementation.
In this sense, the workers’ union proposes as an alternative, to achieve “a regional insertion, a productive complementation at the level of MERCOSUR and Latin America.”
“We are concerned and surely we will be mobilizing in defense of work and the national industry,” said Dárdano.
