Longshoremen.

If you are a longshoreman and you work at one of the nation's West Coast ports, especially Los Angeles or Long Beach, NAPTA has an ugly surprise in store for you: your job will soon be gone.

In order to facilitate the shipment of Chinese goods to the United States, freight will be brought to huge and improved ports, like that at Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico, according to author and investigative journalist Jerome Corsi, "bypassing the Longshoreman's Union in the process." Interestingly, the port in Lazaro Cardenas is owned by Hutchison Port Holdings, a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa, the Chinese firm operated by billionaire Li Ka-shing that now operates the Panama Canal's anchor ports of Cristobal and Balboa following a controversial takeover in the 1990s.

After unloading at Mexican ports, freight will be loaded onto Mexican trucks for shipment to the United States. bypassing Teamsters and U.S. independent owner-operators as well as larger American trucking firms. According to Corsi, the Mexican trucks "will drive on what will be the nation's most modem highway straight into the heart of America."

The plan to ship Asian goods into the United States through NAFTA corridors linking up with Mexican ports has even begun to draw the ire of socialists. Richard Vogel, writing for the socialist Monthly Review, argues that this NAFTA-based plan "signals the beginning of the assault on labor in the north, which could eventually result in the offshoring of hundreds of thousands of transportation jobs to the south and undermine the working class on both sides of the border significantly." Among those who will be most affected will be America's dockworkers.