Many Sources, Same Message: Trade Policy Must Be Changed

by James Parks, Mar 30, 2007

It’s been a busy week on trade issues.

While the Bush administration is scrambling to get Congress to renew Fast Track trade promotion authority, which expires June 30, two key congressional leaders let President Bush know that new principles must apply to trade deals. The next day, union leaders and a top national news commentator told Congress the trade system is fundamentally flawed and must be changed.

Reps. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), House Ways and Means Committee chairman, and Sander Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the panel’s Trade Subcommittee, on Tuesday unveiled a set of trade principles on labor, investment, the environment, procurement, subsidies, currency manipulation, improved enforcement of trade rules, and other issues. 

The principles include a commitment that all parties to free trade agreements with the United States adopt, maintain and enforce core  International Labor Organization (ILO) standards in their domestic labor laws and agree to effective enforcement provisions in trade agreements equal to those available for enforcement of commercial provisions.

The ILO’s core labor standards include freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively, and prohibitions on child labor, forced labor and discrimination.  The Democratic principles also call for expanded education, training, and health and pension benefits for workers.

The proposals were discussed with the House Democratic Caucus in a March 27 meeting and forwarded to the administration.

AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee says the Rangel-Levin proposal “represents a significant step forward in fixing the Bush administration’s broken trade policy.”

Adds Lee:

While the outlined amendments to the Peru and Panama trade agreements do not completely address all of the AFL-CIO’s concerns with respect to procurement, services and investment, the proposal does represent major progress on workers’ core rights and environmental standards. It also addresses long-neglected concerns such as currency, trade enforcement and other key issues. We’re encouraged by today’s proposal and look forward to working with Congress to continue to improve our trade policy so that it will protect workers’ fundamental rights and contribute to good jobs, both in the U.S. and abroad.

In a press conference, Levin said all pending free trade agreements have problems, but he singled out the Colombian deal. Noting the violence against trade unionists in Colombia, Levin called for a thorough review of U.S. relations with the country.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists—2,262 union leaders and members have been assassinated since 1991 for exercising their fundamental worker rights—and the government routinely ignores or violates internationally recognized workers’ rights. On March 15, executives of U.S.-based Chiquita Brands, one of Colombia’s top employers, admitted paying paramilitary terrorists for “protection” of its workers.

The AFL-CIO has said the United States should not consider a trade pact until Colombia meets an established set of human rights benchmarks, including breaking ties with the paramilitary units that are suspected of most of the killings of union members and implementing the ILO standards.

Meanwhile, during hearings Wednesday on trade, CNN anchor and commentator Lou Dobbs said current trade policy has hurt America’s workers because of the “ballooning trade deficit” created by the influx of cheap goods produced overseas by workers who are paid low wages and work in sweatshop conditions.

Dobbs told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade:

Corporate America and our country’s political elites have combined to put this country’s middle‑class working men and women into direct competition with the world’s cheapest labor.

At the same hearing, Lee told lawmakers that our trade policy has failed in every respect:

It has failed to create good jobs and healthy communities at home.  It has failed to foster equitable, democratic and sustainable development abroad.  It has failed to safeguard our long-term national security interests. And it has utterly failed to ensure that American producers and workers are able to compete successfully in the global economy.

Lee said we talk about spreading democracy, but that our trade deals miss the point:

Democracy is not easy.  It cannot be exported at the end of a bayonet or a missile.  Formal guarantees and institutions are vital, but are only a beginning.  The words of democracy, expressed in charters and constitutions, must reflect the values and aspirations of the people. Understanding and respect for democratic values are built, person by person, organization by organization, in the fabric of civil society.

Trade unions are an essential building block in that process. This is why we in the U.S. labor movement, together with our brothers and sisters in unions around the world, have worked so hard to insist that protection of international workers’ core rights must be a crucial component of international trade rules.

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