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Workers in Seattle Protest U.S.-South Korea Closed-Door Trade Talks |
The Bush administration is once again holding trade talks without allowing working people at the table. This time, it’s the South Korea-U.S. trade deal, and the closed-door meetings are being held in Seattle starting today.
But it’s going to be pretty hard for the negotiators to ignore the nearly 700 workers, environmentalists and members of community groups who marched in the streets outside the talks to protest another anti-worker agreement.
Known as KORUS, the pact with South Korea could be the largest U.S. trade agreement since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented in 1994.
Just like it has done in previous agreements, the Bush administration has locked workers and environmentalists out of the talks. So “we are being forced to express our opinions by going to the streets,” Misook Lee, vice president of the (South) Korean Medical and Health Workers’ Union, said at a Seattle press conference Tuesday.
In June, a unified U.S. and South Korean union movement signed a declaration opposing KORUS. The declaration—signed by the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)—says KORUS, like other trade agreements pushed by the Bush White House, fails to protect workers’ rights and the environment and undermines governments’ ability to regulate public services while strongly protecting the investments and profits of multinational corporations.
In July, 170,000 South Korean union members staged a general strike to protest the trade deal. The AFL-CIO and affiliated unions are pushing for all trade agreements to include enforceable workers’ rights clauses and environmental protections.
Yesterday, AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee called on South Korean and American leaders to:
… impose a moratorium on the negotiations until we can change their direction and incorporate the voices of working families. These deals aren’t opening foreign markets for American-produced goods. They’re greasing the skids to move more good jobs out of the United States faster.
NAFTA was supposed to open markets in Mexico for American-produced consumer goods. Instead, it has drastically increased our trade deficit with Mexico and Canada…entailing the loss of more than 1 million U.S. jobs over the past 12 years. These agreements simply haven’t delivered on their key promises.
Writing in the Washington State Labor Council’s WSLC Reports Today, David Groves lays out the case against KORUS and the Bush definition of free trade:
Free trade agreements routinely impose brand new trade restrictions, in order to protect corporate profits, often in direct conflict with clear public interest. Case in point, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) imposes “intellectual property” laws on pharmaceutical products that are designed to delay and limit the introduction of generic drugs and market competition….U.S. trade representatives list pharmaceutical and intellectual property issues right at the top of the “extremely challenging” issues they hope to resolve in this week’s Seattle KORUS talks.
The costs of recent free trade agreements are ignored, while their benefits are touted. While port traffic may have increased and created some good jobs, there is clear evidence that far more family-wage U.S. manufacturing jobs—millions of them—have been lost and moved overseas, and that this offshore outsourcing has been facilitated and hastened by free trade agreements.
As Washington State Labor Council President Rick Bender pointed out in a November 2004 column:
When families lose their incomes and lose their opportunities for a better future because of imports, outsourcing and offshoring, we should acknowledge the damage.
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