Trade agreements’ flaws are rooted in moral issues
(Editor’s note: The following excerpts are from a speech delivered by UAW President Ron Gettelfinger to the Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference in Mackinac Island, Mich., on May 31. For the full speech, please visit www.uaw.org.)
On May 1 Congressman Charles Rangel and Congressman Sander Levin, both Democrats, reached an agreement with the Bush administration to include labor and environmental protections in bilateral trade agreements with Peru and Panama.
For the first time ever, the key principles of international agreements on labor rights and the environment will be included in the main text of trade agreements. The labor standards, adopted from the International Labor Organization, include freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, a ban on child labor and forced labor, and a ban on all forms of discrimination.
Signatories to these agreements will also be required to enforce environmental laws and regulations, and to uphold international treaties on environmental protection. For the first time, workers and the environment will receive the same priority as copyright, patents and other property rights. …
Regardless of the circumstances that bring it about, when an employer steals the childhood of a 9-year-old laborer in an offshore factory, that is heinous. … When an unscrupulous company steals from us all by dumping harmful chemicals in the drinking water of a developing nation, we ought to be able to stop such behavior.
These aren’t just business issues, labor issues or environmental issues. These are moral issues. …
That’s why organized labor is strongly opposed to a proposed free trade deal with Colombia. Four hundred trade unionists in Colombia have been murdered since President Alvaro Uribe took office in 2002 – 72 in the last year alone – by police and government-backed paramilitaries. … It’s organized labor’s obligation to urge Congress to reject any deal with Colombia until that nation agrees to put an end to these unconscionable murders and other violations of human rights.
In Colombia the key issue is human rights. The proposed U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement has a different flaw, but it’s just as fatal. It fails the basic test that must be applied to any trade agreement: reciprocity.
Last year Korea exported 695,134 vehicles to the United States. About 554,000 of these vehicles were made by Korean companies. The United States was allowed to export 5,732 vehicles to Korea, about 4,000 of which were made by DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors.
The proposed trade deal will reduce or eliminate tariffs on Korean vehicles entering the United States, and encourage the import of Korean cars and pickup trucks into the United States. But the agreement does nothing to increase U.S. exports into Korea.
The jobs of tens of thousands of workers will be at risk if this agreement is implemented as written. … Let’s take steps to make sure South Korea opens its market to American-made goods before we reduce tariffs and open our borders to more imports that will drain U.S. jobs and harm U.S. businesses.
Ron Gettelfinger
