Those bills are also called the so-called "free trade" deals with Colombia, South Korea and Panama. The president is making a concerted push to get these bills rammed through Congress by August. Which just boggles the mind.
Let’s focus today mostly on Colombia, a place that is a dangerous place for trade unionists, as a letter signed by 430 U.S. and Colombian organizations and leaders released today demonstrates:
Labor rights in Colombia were subject to serious scrutiny long before the debate over the FTA began. Colombia continues to be the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists; 51 unionists were murdered in 2010 alone. Only 6 percent of investigations into the cases of murdered unionists since 1986 have reached a conviction, which signifies a 94% impunity rate for the perpetrators. Meanwhile, the intellectual authors of these crimes profit from a business environment that leaves workers voiceless. U.S. workers will be unable to compete with a job market that does not provide guarantees for union organizing. By not addressing the root causes of labor-related violence in Colombia, the FTA will sacrifice the possibility of a fair workplace for workers in the U.S. and Colombia.
Workers in Colombia are subjected to an exploitative workplace. For example, over 800,000 Colombians are employed through Associative Labor Cooperatives (CTAs) in the sugar, palm oil, health, mining and port industries, among others; all of these will be affected by the implementation of the FTA. CTAs enable companies to subcontract workers through third-party intermediaries in labor-intensive industries without the responsibility of providing contracts and basic benefits to employees. Workers in CTAs have no collective bargaining rights, and companies have no incentive to uphold basic labor standards.
If you want to close your eyes and blindly support an Administration that supports this kind of horrendous legislation, be my guest. But, the facts are the facts: so-called "free trade" with Colombia means that this country will be endorsing murder–explicitly or implicitly. The blood of murdered trade unionists will be on this Administration’s hands.
And there needs to be a very clear understanding about the fairy dust that will be sprinkled at us with the rhetoric of more "enforcement" and "retraining" because both of those reassurances–that the deal has "tougher" enforcement provisions and workers here will be "retrained"–are a cruel hoax.
Be honest: we have an entirely inadequate system in this country just to watch over safety and health in the workplace, funded at a miniscule level of several hundred million dollars—and, yet, we even more ludicrously now propose to believe that enforcement in South Korea, Colombia or Peru will be any different? We have a labor system here that makes it impossible to organize unions–so why would anyone believe we can demand that murderers abide by labor rights far away?
The fact is enforcement is a farce, and always has been. It was a farce created to buy a few votes to jam NAFTA through a Democratic Congress. It was a farce concocted by a Democratic president and his Labor secretary (Robert Reich), who were both full-throated champions of NAFTA and so-called "free trade".
Retraining, as I wrotehere and here, is simply a way to silence workers with a bait-and-switch strategy–concede that we are kissing the job you have now goodbye in return for a promised job somewhere down the road.
The problem is pretty simple: the current jobs are typically decent paying, often-unionized jobs with benefits. The jobs down the road? If they ever materialize, they will be substantially lower-paying, with likely minimal if any benefits, and almost certainly non-union.
This is a surrender strategy dressed up as offense. In the same way that the white flag was raised going all the way back to NAFTA–agreeing to retraining and "side agreements" as a sop for giving in on the bad trade deals–the "expanded" retraining is just Fool’s Gold dressed up as hope for employment.
The problem is not enforcement of NAFTA-like agreements, or "retraining".
It is NAFTA-style trade itself and its very conception and framework. Labor and environmental rights are slapped on as add-ons to deals that are sideshows to the meat of these agreements—protecting capital and investors’ rights. We cannot "fix" NAFTA-style trade deals unless we destroy the fundamental motivation behind them-—lower wages and a careful obliteration of every reasonable regulation to protect individuals.
Retrain us like monkeys–and throw us a few crumbs.
Bottom line: passing these so-called "free trade" deals will undermine every other job effort the Administration undertakes. It will, however, make it a whole lot easier to raise campaign cash from big corporate-related donors for 2012 so there is a silver lining there–for someone.
Shame.
The Action: the above letter is going to go to Congress on Thursday. So, pick up the phone and call your Congresscritter.
