WASHINGTON (PAI) — Declaring presidential “fast-track” trade authority dead, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is urging President Obama to construct a new trade policy, as part of larger pro-worker economic policy.
In a major speech on fast-track and trade, and in Q&A afterwards, Trumka called the president’s current trade plan “dead on arrival” in the U.S. Senate because then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., couldn’t find any other Democrats to support it on his panel, which writes trade laws.
Over in the GOP-run House, though Trumka did not say so, three-fourths (150) of House Democrats have abandoned the president’s fast-track proposals, as have at least 28 Republicans.
The death of fast-track, Obama told the Center for American Progress, gives him the opportunity to construct a new trade policy to benefit workers in the U.S. and worldwide, that guarantees labor rights, that protects “buy America” federal, state and local rules and that is not tilted towards corporations, among other positive factors.
And when Obama agrees to go in that new direction, labor stands ready to work with him on crafting it, Trumka pledged. Organized labor is not against trade, he declared, but against unfair trade. “The question is how the U.S. engages in the global economy, and what it means for American workers and workers around the world,” he explained.
Fast-track, formally called trade promotion authority, lets a president rush legislation implementing trade pacts through Congress. The danger with that approach, unions note, is that a president could decide to circumvent hearings at which the public might have input and avoid changes, including pro-labor amendments. Unions also feel that fast track could be used by a chief executive trying to avoid the issue of protection of labor rights by our trading partners.
Existing U.S. trade pacts, Trumka said, have also cost hundreds of thousands of jobs here at home and are a major factor in increasing U.S. income inequality.
U.S. trade officials and the business community that pushes fast-track and trade pacts don’t consider these factors or take note of public opposition to unfair trade, Trumka said. “If you close your eyes and listen to their talk, you’d think it was 1999 or 1994,” Trumka commented. “We can’t enact a failed model” of trade policies or economic policies, he added.
The goal of any new trade policy, he added, “should be to create enforceable labor standards, environmental standards and consumer standards – and to structure the pacts to drive wages up.” Past pacts, he said, drove wages down by encouraging corporations to offshore U.S. jobs unless workers agreed to much lower living standards.
Death of fast-track, Trumka said after the formal Q&A, also means two trade pacts President Obama is negotiating – one with 11 other Pacific Rim countries and the other with the 27-nation European Union – are dead in Congress, at least for this year. If fast-track were to pass, the president would submit legislation implementing the two.
Most of the criticism of those trade pacts has centered on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes extremely low-wage nations that lack worker rights. But Trumka said there are pitfalls in the proposed pact with Europe, too.
One is that big financial institutions “on both sides of the Atlantic” would use that pact to undermine central bank requirements that curb financiers’ speculation. Such speculation, with shaky or no asset backing, led to the 2008 Great Recession, which cost workers millions of jobs in the U.S. and worldwide, he said.
“Our trading partners” over the last 20 years “pushed weak unions, low wages and subsidies for foreign investment – such as tax-free export zones. That gave us a global financial system” that produced the crash, he explained. The old model of trade pacts “fuels bubbles and busts. And ever since the 1980s, big business has looked offshore first, rather than America, as the place to invest.”
A new trade policy would produce the opposite results, he declared. The federation has put together its own trade policy package and is touting it to lawmakers. It includes enforceable worker rights – including the right to organize – and continued central bank requirements for financiers to back their trading with capital.
It also would include preserving “buy America” laws, a ban on using government procurement rules as a way to undercut public servants’ jobs through outsourcing and offshoring, and enforceable language saying that currency manipulation is an unfair trading practice that can be penalized.
That trade policy should be part of a wider Obama economic policy designed to benefit workers, not corporations, he said. “Its best advocate – on his better days – has been Obama,” Trumka said, recalling the president’s statements at a 2009 summit of industrial nations, held in Pittsburgh.
“But we need to pursue policies for a strong cycle of global growth,” he said, “including a global New Deal to bring electricity, water, roads and the Internet” – among other infrastructure “to everyone worldwide.”
That global growth policy would also focus on raising workers’ wages, thus increasing living standards and purchasing power for all workers, in the U.S. and abroad, he added.
Photo: People’s World Flickr
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