I’ve been writing about labor rights and the world economy for so long that I was a bit suspicious after first reading Elizabeth Becker’s May 12th piece in The New York Times entitled “Low Cost and Sweatshop-Free.” (a side note: the web version of this article does not carry that headline but only the sub-head: “Cambodia’s Garmet Makers Hold Off A Vast Chinese Challenger”…maybe the Internet editors don’t find sweatshops relevant?). So, I called up Mark Levinson, the chief economist for UNITE-HERE, who is not only a friend (who turned me on to this great small Venezuelan joint in Chelsea…we’re not telling) but one of the many great labor people around. And the story he tells is an important lesson for the ideological nut-cases out there who scream and moan about quotas and managing the global economy.

First, a quick summary of Becker’s article. Cambodia is holding its own in the garment industry against the onslaught of China. And it is doing so by eliminating the worst of the sweatshop conditions by holding its manufacturers to relatively high labor standards that are monitored by international observers. Let’s not overstate this: Cambodian women (this is essentially a female workforce) make only $45 a MONTH and, as Kate Frieson, an expert quoted in the article, says, “Those wages are so low that all these girls can afford after sending home half their paychecks to their family is to crowd into a single room without electricity and four other girls.”

While Cambodia has unions, there are very few collective bargaining agreements—it’s just hard to get them because employers refuse to bargain in good faith or at all. And the leader of the garment workers union was murdered last year in what was clearly a political assassination (40,000 people showed up for his funeral); corruption is rife. By the way, you want sweet irony: the American ambassador to Cambodia is quoted saying, “The labor unions for the textile workers are some of the best institutions this country has ever had. The exploitation of workers cannot be a path to development–on the contrary, workers have to be treated with respect for development to work.” Hmmmm…I wonder if we can get this guy appointed head of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board so he can get that philosophy implemented here first.

Becker, who is on the global economy beat, does a pretty decent job of describing the industry—but she misses some central points and the larger political context. Mark tells me how this went down. During the Clinton Administration, labor successfully defeated so-called “fast track” legislation–which gives the president the authority to cut trade deals and present them to Congress for an up or down vote, with no amendments allowed (you know, amendments that might strengthen labor rights). The Clintonites were furious and there were very bitter feelings between labor and Clinton (who, I remind you, was a big champion of so-called free trade agreements).

To try to make nice, the Administration approached labor and said, look, Cambodia wants a bi-lateral trade agreement with us, and we’ll do something on labor rights but we want you to figure that piece out. UNITE (this was prior to the merger with HERE) took it on. Working closely with Mark Barenberg from Columbia Law School (who was the prime author of the AFL-CIO petition on Chinese Labor rights, a fascinating document, by the way), Levinson basically constructed a “carrot” for Cambodia: its quotas for exporting garments to the U.S. would be increased if it adhered to labor rights monitored by the International Labor Organization.

The beauty of this deal was it showed that unions in developed countries like the U.S. will support trade deals that include real protections for worker rights, which turn trade agreements into something that’s not just about corporate rights, which is what labor has tried to argue for the last two decades. “And the Cambodian example shows that real worker rights protections can raise living standards for workers in a very poor country,” Mark says. “For example, because of the protections provided in the agreement there was a general strike in the Cambodian apparel industry that led to a increase in the minimum wage.”

Here’s where the story gets messed up by stupid ideology. At the beginning of the year, all the quotas on apparel expired because of a deal made by the World Trade Organization. When that happened, I lamented in a column that it would cause a worldwide disaster for 30 million workers who would lose their jobs as the apparel industry ran off to China for rock-bottom wages costs. But, what I missed was the Cambodian example.

Obliterating the quota system weakens the Cambodian agreement. With no quota system, there is far less incentive for the Cambodian government to continue to live by an agreement that can’t deliver something concrete: no one can promise the Cambodians that if they treat workers well, they will get a bigger share of the American market. It’s hard to take seriously the Cambodian minister of commerce’s promise that the government will continue to abide by the labor standards—there will be too much competitive pressure based on wages for this poor country (according to Becker, one in 13 Cambodians depend on the garment industry’s wages to survive). And in a paragraph way to the end of the story and lacking the context it needs, the local industry association expresses fears that unions would demand higher wages and “are overstepping their bounds with wildcat strikes and need to be reined in.” That’s a code word for future government suppression.

So, there we have it—a perfect example of the blindness of so-called “free-traders” who most probably wrecked a positive test-case of how global trade can work for business and workers, here and abroad.