Failed Trade Talks Offer New Chance to Get It Right This Time

by James Parks, Jul 25, 2006

Now that the top-down global trade talks have collapsed, maybe the world’s political leaders will finally get the message: You can’t have a successful trade scheme unless workers are included from the beginning.

For five years, the Bush administration and foreign trade ministers have tried to rewrite the rules of global trade under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) without considering the views or concerns of workers. Yesterday, the negotiators  admitted they were deadlocked and the WTO’s general secretary “suspended” the so-called Doha round of trade talks, named for the capital of Qatar, where the talks began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The talks collapsed because they were flawed from the beginning, says AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee:

Issues of crucial importance to workers, such as protecting workers’ rights or requiring an assessment of employment impact for new initiatives were never even on the table. At the same time, commercial negotiations on reducing industrial tariffs, increasing market access in services, or eliminating agricultural subsidies were barreling ahead with little regard for the interests and concerns of workers, the integrity of the public sector, the environment or small farmers.

In the end, the trade ministers failed to reach consensus on the most basic elements of the negotiations. This lack of consensus resulted from the failure of current global economic policies to deliver on the promises of good jobs and equitable development in both rich and poor countries.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which includes the AFL-CIO, says yesterday’s suspension of WTO trade talks “comes as no surprise,”
given the blindingly obvious faults in a negotiation strategy that claimed to be concerned with development but looked at nothing other than market access.

In our view, any trade talks that don’t encompass changing unfair trade
practices simply cannot succeed in the current international context.

There is an urgent need for refocusing and rebalancing the negotiations.

The Bush administration has been pushing to finalize the Doha talks so the White House could send the new global trade rules to Congress before its “fast track” trade negotiation authority expires in June 2007. Fast Track prevents an open debate on trade deals and forces Congress to vote up or down on the deal without offering any amendments. Once Fast Track expires, analysts say it will be much more difficult for the Bush White House to get any more trade deals through Congress.

Earlier this month, more than 150 academics, business executives, union leaders, congressional staff and policy researchers attended a summit to discuss strategies to prevent the trade crisis from tripping a global economic downfall. 

Sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Business and Industry Council (USBIC), the summit highlighted how the combination of a soaring trade deficit and anti-worker domestic policies have created a crisis in the global economy that could pull the United States and the world into a 1930s-type depression—unless political leaders muster the courage to change the global trading rules.

Last week, the Bush U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) rejected for a second time the AFL-CIO petition, demanding the U.S. impose sanctions on China if it did not respect workers’ rights. The petition showed how systematic violation of workers’ rights in China artificially represses wages, providing an unfair advantage to products made in China.

Meanwhile, another AFL-CIO report shows China’s fixed currency rate artificially lowers the price of Chinese goods by 40 percent and subsidizes exports, putting U.S. workers and companies at a disadvantage. The undervaluation of China’s currency has been a major factor in America’s job losses and the growing trade deficit with China.
 
Coming on the heels of the USTR’s rejection of the AFL-CIO petition, the collapse of the WTO trade talks points to a stubborn refusal by the Bush administration to consider any opinion but its own when it comes to trade. It failed to see that the WTO talks have been in trouble for a long time. Beginning in 1999 in Seattle, a massive protest organized by the AFL-CIO and its allies calling for fair trade that included workers’ rights and real initiatives to fight world poverty contributed to the collapse of the ministerial talks. The Doha Round was launched in 2001 but has not stayed on track since then, with a failed ministerial in Cancun in 2003, and more missed deadlines at the most recent ministerial meeting in Hong Kong.

Critics of the AFL-CIO and backers of so-called free trade have often claimed free trade is good for the world’s workers. But one of the biggest boosters of free trade, New York Times’ Tom Friedman, recently admitted he doesn’t even know what’s in the trade agreements he backs, according to author David Sirota in Sirotablog. 

The AFL-CIO and its allies are pushing for trade talks that discuss ways to strengthen international protections for workers’ rights, rather than allow global competitive pressures to undermine those protections, Lee says:

If WTO rules can be applied to protect copyrights and patents across national borders, judge whether national environmental or public health laws are legitimate, and pressure governments to eliminate or reform subsidy programs, then surely the WTO can clarify that no country should gain a competitive advantage by violating the human rights of its own workers.

Addressing the social dimension of global economic rules needs to be at the very center of the WTO debate, not an afterthought or empty rhetoric. Maybe this failure to reach agreement will convince our negotiators and their counterparts that an entirely new approach to global trade rules is needed if significant forward progress is to be attained.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (0)