TV REVIEW : ‘Leaving Home’ Looks at Free Trade Agreement

The closing of the Van Nuys General Motors plant just before Labor Day was bitterly ironic enough, but it also reminded us--as if we needed it--that the rampant loss of American factory jobs to cheap-wage regions like Southeast Asia and Mexico isn’t just a Rust Belt problem.

One of the many problems with “Leaving Home,” a one-hour edition of the labor series, “We Do the Work” (at 6 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28; 3 p.m. Sunday on KOCE-TV Channel 50) is that the documented factory closures take place in towns like Union City, Ind., and Springfield, Mo. The loss is nationwide, though you’d never know from this report.

But to chart such effects in Southern California would complicate “Leaving Home’s” agenda, which is to raise questions about the touted benefits of the impending North America Free Trade Agreement. If the theory behind the agreement works, free trade between the United States, Mexico and Canada will bring economic growth to all three, and will especially benefit the border areas--such as Southern California. It may be, as the Hudson Institute’s Allan Reynolds argues in the film, that harsh economics right now will bring long-term benefits.

It may also be, as the Economic Policy Institute’s Jeff Faux counters, that the factory flight is nothing more than corporations protecting their back side, with no regard for worker wages or safety in Mexico. Just as companies such as Zenith once moved assembly plants from northern U.S. cities to lower-wage towns like Springfield, so they are now making border towns like Matamoros and Reynosa the new Springfields.

Too late into this report, though, is the gravest doubt raised about the free trade agreement: How will the United States ensure that the Mexican government enforces and beefs up environmental regulations that will stop a toxic-poisoned border area from getting worse? While “Leaving Home” devotes needed time to the polluted villages of Mexican workers, it fails to note that free trade means nothing if U.S. consumers refuse to buy tainted Mexican produce.

With Ned Beatty’s faint-hearted narration, the film limps along for an hour without asking all the hard questions.