Story highlights Elizabeth Warren: Even Canada can see that "right to work" laws in the US undercut American workers

NAFTA renegotiations need to add a repeal to the provision that allows states to enact them at the expense of workers' wages, health care and pensions, she writes

Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, is the senior senator from Massachusetts. The views expressed are her own.

(CNN) President Donald Trump, a loud and persistent critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), recently began renegotiating this trade deal with Canada and Mexico. The President promised to secure a fair deal for American workers. That sounds great. After all, we don't think Americans should be forced to compete with poorly paid workers from Mexico or elsewhere, and we can demand that companies that want to trade with us lift wages, benefits, and health and safety standards for their foreign workers.

So it probably came as a shock that one of Canada's main goals in this renegotiation is to get the United States to treat our own workers better . Canada doesn't want its workers competing with poorly-treated laborers -- including workers in the United States. And they have a specific target in mind.

Elizabeth Warren

According to Canada's major newspaper The Globe and Mail , Canadian negotiators are urging the United States to roll back so-called state "right to work" laws that undercut worker power in the US. I'm glad we're renegotiating NAFTA because it has been a raw deal for American workers. But the Canadians are giving America a wake-up call. As negotiations continue, the United States should take a close look at how our own broken labor policies are hurting American workers -- and fix them.

The Canadians focused on so-called "right-to-work" laws, the state regulations that make union dues optional even when unions bargain and represent all the workers. These state laws are a powerful weapon in the war against working people. Twenty-eight states have passed these laws, whose main purpose is to make it harder for workers to have the resources they need to stand up for themselves. Because of these laws starving unions of resources, union leaders face an uphill battle when they try to help workers join together to advocate for higher wages and benefits. And the completely predictable consequences for workers in these states have been devastating.

Strong unions lift wages for all workers -- even those workers who aren't union members. Union membership is sharply lower in "right-to-work" states -- after all, that was the whole point of these laws. And the impact is clear: In "right-to-work" states, wages are lower and employees are less likely to have access to employer-provided health care and pensions -- and that's true for union and nonunion employees.

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