Executive Council Lays Out Plan to Change Trade Deals

by James Parks, Mar 6, 2007

In the November 2006 elections, voters made it clear they want a change in the nation’s trade policies. Today, the union movement offered a new legislative approach to trade deals that we will recommend to the new Congress.

The Bush administration’s flawed trade policy has contributed to a record $764 billion trade deficit and has driven down global standards by allowing our trading partners to gain an unfair competitive advantage by engaging in widespread workers’ rights and environmental abuses, United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka said today.

Current trade policy has cost the United States millions of good jobs by encouraging multinational corporations to move overseas with tax breaks, lopsided trade rules and an overvalued currency.

Gerard says the American public knows we are competing in a highly competitive global economy.

All of us are also acutely aware that the damage being done by our current trade policies—to workers, farmers and businesses alike—cries out for Congress to overhaul these policies before they do any more damage.

Gerard and Trumka spoke with reporters in Las Vegas this afternoon at an AFL-CIO briefing that explained the union movement’s stand on globalization and trade as part of the AFL-CIO annual winter meeting.

Our current trade policy has failed our workers, our communities and our environment— here and in other nations, Trumka said.

The simple fact is we need a new direction on trade.

The AFL-CIO Executive Council today adopted a statement that calls on Congress to institute new reforms on trade that stop our jobs from being exported and put our workers and the companies they work for on a level playing field.

The council statement outlines the principles that should be embodied in all U.S. trade policies:

• Enforceable ILO core labor standards in every trade agreement, so no government and no corporation can gain a comparative advantage by violating workers’ human rights.
• Reform of the environment, investment, government procurement, intellectual property rights, and services provisions in trade agreements .
• Our negotiators must not put our trade laws on the chopping block, nor should they make irreversible commitments with respect to immigration policy.
• We need more transparency and much broader public participation in the negotiation of trade rules, at both the national and international levels.  Business is not the only constituency affected by trade, and it should not be the only nongovernment group at the table when these deals are cut.

To address these concerns, the agreements with Peru and Panama need to be renegotiated, the council said, and new language put on the table in ongoing trade talks with South Korea and Malaysia. The trade agreement with Colombia should be put off until the government puts an end to the continuing murders of trade unionists and brings those responsible for the violence of the last two decades to justice.

At the same time, Congress must reassert its role in trade negotiations, Trumka said. Since 1974, Congress has delegated that authority to the executive branch through Fast Track trade promotion authority, which comes up for renewal June 30.

The Bush White House last month began its push to renew Fast Track, which allows the president to negotiate trade deals but prevents Congress from improving or rejecting harmful provisions by allowing only “yes” or “no” votes on such agreements. Fast Track would enable the Bush administration to pass more bad trade deals, such as the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), that are skewed in favor of the interests of Big Business, not workers.

This system has utterly failed, Trumka says, and the failure is evident in the record U.S. trade deficit as well as in the weak worker rights and environmental provisions in all trade agreements negotiated by the Bush administration.

To reform this broken system, the Executive Council recommended four key reforms to existing trade policy:

• A serious strategic review of existing trade agreements before we start any new trade negotiations. We need to re-examine actual trade and investment patterns that result from current trade deals by sector and by state, as well as their impacts on employment, living standards, social regulation and communities.
• Congress should have a role in choosing trade partners and in laying out “readiness criteria,” which it does not have under our current set of rules.
• Negotiating objectives laid out by Congress must be mandatory, rather than optional. These mandatory negotiating objectives should, at a minimum, address labor, environment, investment, procurement, protecting our trade laws, intellectual property rights, services and immigration.
• Perhaps most important, Congress must certify that an agreement has met all the mandatory objectives before the agreement can be signed.  Without such certification, an agreement will not receive expedited and preferential consideration and will be subject to amendment.

Speaking yesterday at the Center for American Progress (CAP), Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade, says past policies of keeping Congress in the dark and ignoring lawmakers in trade deals won‘t work anymore.