A union president put on a Kill NAFTA T-shirt this week. The argument people were making in 1993 is the same one he is making about AI.
On Thursday, May 21, 2026, the president of America's largest auto union stood on a podium in a t-shirt that read "Kill NAFTA: Save the Working Class." With the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement's review deadline forty days away, Shawn Fain of the UAW called on the United States to upend or scrap the trade deal — and said something worth stopping over. "Where it didn't eliminate jobs entirely, it slashed wages and benefits."
The argument runs longer than one afternoon. On April 16, on Capitol Hill, Fain stood with Sen. Bernie Sanders and said it in a different room — that millions of jobs were destroyed on false promises of shared prosperity, that the country called it NAFTA, and that the same greedy corporate power brokers today want everyone to believe killing millions of jobs in the name of AI will be a good thing. On May 11, the Michigan Advance ran his essay: Artificial intelligence is the UAW's latest life-threatening crisis. On May 21, the t-shirt and the USMCA scrap call. Three rooms. One vocabulary. One union president with 400,000 members telling the country the same thing three times in thirty days.
The polite American story about AI this week is that the country is studying it. The White House postponed its federal AI executive order on Wednesday; the president told reporters he "didn't like certain aspects" of the draft. Minneapolis voted Thursday for a six-month data-center moratorium and exempted downtown. Sam Altman's OpenAI published a 13-page blueprint proposing a 32-hour workweek and a wealth fund partially funded by AI companies. The dialect is deliberation. Things are talked about. Forms are filed.
The system did what it does in 1993, too. At the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, Bill Clinton signed NAFTA with three former presidents standing behind him. To the workers who were nervous, he gave a specific guarantee: the gains from the agreement would be the workers' gains, too. The Economic Policy Institute counted the gains afterward. By the year 2000, 766,000 American job opportunities were gone, seventy-two percent of them in manufacturing. The renegotiated deal — USMCA — was supposed to close the wage gap between American and Mexican auto workers. American pay reaches around thirty-five dollars an hour. The Mexican average is around five-seventy. Fewer than one in ten Mexican plants meets the USMCA wage threshold. The 2025 Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board found Mexico out of compliance. The rule was rewritten. The wage gap held. The plants stayed where the labor was cheapest.
That is the receipt. The trade rule wrote the contract. The contract disposed of the worker. The renegotiation did not fix it.
The cycle is running again now, in a new vocabulary. Two weeks ago this Dispatch counted six American CEOs in sixteen days putting AI on the public record as the structural rationale for cuts — Cloudflare, Freshworks, Coinbase, PayPal, Arctic Wolf, Meta. The press releases said AI did it. The legally required forms say something else. In the first full year of New York's WARN Act AI-attribution disclosure field, more than 160 mass layoff notices have been filed. Zero attribute the layoff to AI. The press releases name the lever. The forms required by law name nothing. Same shape as 1993.
There is an honest answer to this we should not skip. The American Enterprise Institute makes it in Is AI the New NAFTA? — that NAFTA worked in macro terms, the failure was inadequate support for displaced workers, and the answer is a real transition program with wage insurance and retraining. The argument deserves a sentence, not a dismissal. The union's response is sharper: a transition program changes the catch. It does not change the rule.
The other honest answer is Altman's: AI will create new categories of work, the way every previous technological revolution did. We will take it the way we took Brad Garlinghouse at Ripple last week — hope, not faith. The 32-hour week is the UAW's old demand, on the books for years before Altman gave the speech. The counter-CEOs are one boardroom away from a different decision.
There are two practical things worth doing this week. The first is formal. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative opens public comment for the July 1 USMCA review, and the comment file is part of the record the negotiators actually read. Anyone can file. Two paragraphs naming an industry, a town, or a labor floor that ought to be written into the next agreement carries more weight than the form letters that fill these files. The second is local. The physical infrastructure of replacement gets decided in rooms small enough to walk into — the planning commission, the zoning board, the county supervisors. Minneapolis voted Thursday; the next county votes next month. The Hum lists every Virginia data-center hearing on the calendar, and the model is repeatable in any state. Knowing the agenda is the difference between watching the rule get written and being in the room when it is.
Humanity is not a problem to solve. The rule that wrote 766,000 American manufacturing job opportunities out of existence between 1993 and 2000 did not solve a problem. It was a decision about whose work was worth holding onto and whose was not. The contract being written by the AI rule right now is making the same decision in a new vocabulary. The people on the wrong side of that decision are not abstractions, and they are not waste to be removed from a system. They are workers — by trade, by town — and the rule is being written about them. A man in a Kill NAFTA T-shirt just said the part out loud, for the second time in a generation.
Kill NAFTA was a t-shirt this morning. By July 1 it will be a vote. By 2028 it will be a strike date. We don't have to wait for any of them to start writing our names back into the record.
— Stay Human ★