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They Still Don't Get It December 2001 IBEW Journal Perhaps it is impossible to overestimate how brazen multinational corporations can be in turning the truth upside down. Once again Congress is being asked to change the rules on foreign trade to speed up the export of our jobs while corporations shop the world for the lowest possible wage rates. The reason for a change now? Corporate North America has discovered that much of the world lives in poverty, and poverty, they decided, is what causes terrorists to murder people. As if world poverty started since September 11. As if colonialism and wage manipulation by global investors played no role. This time the issue is fast track, an attempt to deny Congress the authority to amend a trade agreement and just say yes or no to the entire package. U.S. trade negotiators don 't need fast track. Since American workers scored a major victory by taking fast track authority away during the Clinton Administration, more than 300 trade agreements have been negotiated. Congress reviewed them in an orderly use of the U.S. system of checks and balances by one branch of government on another. We call that democracy, and we don't think it should be suspended But now, like the vile profiteers from previous wars, lobbyists for the world's biggest corporations are lining up to cash in. They see a chance to take advantage of our current national trauma to take a bit step toward enactment of future agreements, like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would extend the provisions of NAFTA beyond Mexico to virtually every country in this hemisphere. What our enemies know is that North American workers' only hope of getting enforceable worker rights in FTAA is through congressional amendment. Thus, they feel the urgency to get something done before the makeup of Congress can be changed in the 2002 elections. In the years since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, the Economic Policy Institute finds that 3 million U.S. jobs have been wiped out, with the annual rate of loss running about six times faster than before NAFTA. Now, in wartime, some want to undercut out shaky industrial base even further. In October, 415, 000 Americans lost their jobs, half of them in manufacturing. Only a fool would abandon our national security needs and rely on war materiel from abroad. The only fast track we should be on is the road to enforcement in every trade agreement of the basic principles of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which call for no slave labor or child labor, with workers free to associate freely, to form unions and to bargain collectively. Child labor remains a worldwide horror story with an estimated 2.5 million children still exploited every day. That problem is particularly acute in Pakistan, yet rather than oppose child labor, our adversaries would use Pakistan's pivotal role in the war on terrorism to lower tariffs and make it even easier to import products of child labor. They say it's protectionism to keep out products of child labor, yet the World Trade Organization authorizes the rawest form of protectionism in enforcement of copyrights, allowing corporations to force poor countries to buy from them and pay more. Meanwhile, the fast track proposal makes no mention of worker or human rights in all of its 52 pages of text. Here's an episode that gives a clearer picture of the real corporate game plan. A decade ago, a Malaysian electronics union-with a lot of U.S. labor help-won agreement from its government for recognition and the right to bargain. But then union recognition was abruptly withdrawn and a national labor federation leader was arrested. What happened, it was subsequently learned, was U.S. and Japanese electronics firms told the government they would pull all of their investment if unions were tolerated. So much for wanting to alleviate world poverty. Jeremiah J. O'Connor |
...Like the vile profiteers from previous wars, lobbyists for the world's biggest corporations are lining up to cash in. |
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