Unions on USMCA: ‘Working people made it better’

January 28, 2020 by

Minnesota’s fair-trade movement has kept the heat on members of Congress, and it paid off with improved labor provisions in the USMCA.

President Trump is expected to sign the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) into law at a White House ceremony Wednesday. While it’s sure to be a victory lap for the president, the nation’s top labor leader says much of the credit for getting the deal done should go to working people.

“Make no mistake, we demanded a trade deal that benefits workers and fought every single day to negotiate that deal; and now we have secured an agreement that working people can proudly support,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said.

Senators voted Jan. 16 to approve the USMCA, but the agreement faced its toughest test earlier in the House, where labor-friendly Democrats won a majority in 2018 midterm elections.

After trade ambassadors for the U.S., Mexico and Canada signed the new pact in November 2018, the AFL-CIO and its allies in the fair-trade movement went to work, pushing lawmakers to demand significant improvements before signing off on the agreement.

The lobbying push, backed by phone calls and emails from thousands of union members across the country, resulted in the first U.S. trade agreement the AFL-CIO has endorsed since a 2001 deal with Jordan.

To improve on Trump’s initial effort, congressional Democrats added language making the USMCA’s labor standards more enforceable, including a rapid-response authority capable of investigating allegations of union-busting or other abuses firsthand.

Trumka called the final version of the USMCA “a vast improvement over both the original NAFTA and the flawed proposal brought forward in 2017.” The agreement also “eliminates special carve outs for corporations like the giveaway to Big Pharma in the administration’s initial proposal and loopholes designed to make it harder to prosecute labor violations,” he said.

While House Democrats managed to improve the USMCA, not all unions share Trumka’s enthusiasm.

In a letter to members of Congress, Machinists Union President Robert Martinez Jr. said the USMCA did not do enough to replace “the current trade template” that has bled the nation’s industrial sector of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

“As we have repeatedly said, to win the support of the IAM, the USMCA must make fundamental changes to NAFTA in order to curtail the massive outsourcing of work in aerospace and other manufacturing sectors to Mexico,” Martinez wrote.

Doug Williams, director of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, called the USMCA “the best of bad choices” from a labor perspective.

The agreement already has prompted Mexico to begin raising its labor standards, and the USMCA provides stronger mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement of standards in all three countries. But those mechanisms won’t mean much, Williams said, unless officials have the will to use them.

“On paper it looks great,” the longtime trade activist and Communications Worker said. “But it’s complicated, it’s time-consuming, and the entire process relies on the good faith of whatever U.S. administration is in charge of enforcement at any given time. So that makes our presidential elections even more important.”

Labor standards fared better than environmental standards in the USMCA’s final version. Notoriously undemocratic trade tribunals – known as “investor state dispute settlement” systems – are mostly phased out of the agreement, except for those protecting energy companies from pollution laws. And opponents point out that in the USMCA’s 2,000-plus pages, not once does it mention climate change.

“There’s a well-documented record of corporations using NAFTA to dodge environmental standards in the U.S. by shipping out to Mexico,” Williams said. “That’s still going to be a problem.”

While the effectiveness the USMCA and its new labor standards can only be judged over time, the Trump administration’s push to rewrite U.S. trade policy marches on.

Agreements with the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa and the Philippines are in various stages of negotiations. The USMCA creates “a new standard” for any future agreement, Trumka said, thanks to the efforts of working people and their unions.

“President Trump may have opened this deal, but working people closed it,” Trumka added. “And for that, we should be very proud.”

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Public finally gets a look at TPP – and it isn’t pretty

November 5, 2015 by

web.tpp-aboveLabor, environmental and other fair-trade activists are getting their first look at the Tran-Pacific Partnership, released to the public overnight. Their initial reaction?

It’s worse than expected.

“It’s absolutely not a progressive trade deal,” Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition director Kaela Berg said after an early analysis of the text.

“It’s clear that TPP will perpetuate offshoring of our jobs and stagnation of our wages. There aren’t strong, enforceable labor and environmental standards, which have been a constant worry since NAFTA.”

[Tell your members of Congress to oppose the TPP! Click here to take action.]

The public release of the TPP, a 12-nation trade agreement covering about 40 percent of the global economy, starts the clock on a 90-day review period, after which Congress may approve or reject – but not amend – the pact.

Berg said the Fair Trade Coalition, which unites family-farm, environmental and labor groups, would use the review period to educate the public about what’s at stake in the TPP – and to lobby Minnesota’s Congressional delegation to vote “no.”

All seven DFLers in Congress voted against so-called “fast track” authorization, which positioned TPP for a simple up-or-down vote, over the summer, and Berg was cautiously optimistic they would vote to reject TPP as well. Republican Reps. Tom Emmer and Erik Paulsen are “poster boys for corporate free-trade,” she added, and likely to vote “yes.”

“All the officials are going to want to look at the text and see what’s in there,” Berg said.

Many union officials were busy doing the same today, leading to a chorus of warnings about the TPP’s impact on jobs, wages, public health and more.

“This much is clear,” said Rick Ryan of the Minnesota State Council of Machinists after a first read through the TPP. “The rich get richer as we race to the bottom.”

Citizens Trade Campaign, a fair-trade advocacy group, said the TPP would force U.S. workers to compete with workers abroad who, in some member countries, earn less than $1 per hour. It also would ban laws that encourage government agencies to buy American-made or locally made products.

“TPP will do nothing to promote manufacturing jobs here in the U.S.” Bob Ryan, a Minnesota-based representative of the United Steelworkers, said. “In fact, it will promote more job loss through outsourcing to low wage countries.”

Nurses warned of a provision in the TPP that protects multinational pharmaceutical companies by delaying the introduction of generic drugs into the market, making health care more expensive and life-saving medicines harder to access. In fact, the TPP would roll back some of the protections for access to medicine included in trade agreements negotiated during the George W. Bush administration.

National Nurses United President RoseAnn DeMoro likened the provisions to “gifts to the billionaire drug companies,” and called the TPP “a cruel and disgraceful threat to the lives of millions of people.”

The TPP also threatens U.S. sovereignty, critics said. It would grant corporations new powers to challenge U.S. laws, regulations and court decisions in an extrajudicial tribunal known as the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) court.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, the highest-ranking labor leader in the U.S., pledged unions would “join with our allies to defeat the TPP.”

“From what we have already seen, it is clear that the threats of this expansive new agreement outweigh its benefits – for good jobs, for democracy, for affordable medicines, for consumer safety, and for the environment,” Trumka said.

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‘Robust’ trade advisory council wins approval at Capitol

May 24, 2013 by

MNFTCThe Minnesota Trade Policy Advisory Council is back and, fair-trade advocates believe, better than ever.

The Jobs and Economic Development bill signed into law by Gov. Mark Dayton this week included reauthorization of the Trade Policy Advisory Council, which saw its authority “sunset” in 2012, but in a new form – one more inclusive of the groups with a stake in international trade policy.

While previous trade advisory groups have been populated mostly with state agency heads and elected officials, the new council will include appointees from the business community, organized labor, environmental groups and family farmers, as well as a bipartisan collection of legislators.

The Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition, an issue-based umbrella organization of more than 40 labor, family farm, environmental, faith and social justice groups statewide, praised the reauthorization in a statement released today.

“International trade negotiations are occurring constantly, and they have a huge effect on Minnesota’s economy and quality of life,” said Josh Wise, director of the fair trade coalition. “It is important that we analyze how these talks will affect us here in Minnesota, and make our voice, as a state, heard in the negotiations.”

[Click here to read more on the impact free trade agreements have had on Minnesota’s economy.]

The TPAC is required to meet at least once a year and report back to the governor and Legislature about potential U.S. trade agreements and their impact on the state’s economy. The council also may offer draft legislation to implement the recommendations.

Kera Peterson, chair of the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition and an organizer for the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, called the council “a real opportunity for Minnesotans to understand how they are being affected by globalization, and how we can create our place in the global economy.

“Trade Agreements like NAFTA and the Korea FTA have proved not to be in best interest of Minnesotans. It’s important that we make our voice heard on pending deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and any agreement with the European Union. Minnesota has a nation leading quality of life, and its important that that not be undermined by unfair trade practices.”

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