From: Leila Salazar (leila@globalexchange.org)
Date: Mon Jul 22 2002 - 19:06:02 EDT
Global Exchange Fast Track Update, July 22, 2001
In this update you will find:
1. Background info on Fastrack
2. What can you do THIS WEEK to stop Fast Track?
3. ACTION ALERT: NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY, JULY 25 TO STOP FAST TRACK
4. OP-Ed: Fast Track is wrong on number of fronts
By Art Pulaski and Jon Rainwater
5. There's Only So Much That Foreign Trade Can Do
By Alan Tonelson
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Dear Friends,
We write to you today to update you on Fast Track Trade Negotiating
Authority and also to let you know what you can do to help this week.
Background info on Fast Track/WHY STOP FAST TRACK?
Fast Track is a fundamentally undemocratic procedure by which the US
Congress surrenders its ability to craft trade policy. If Fast Track
passes, debate on trade bills will be severely limited, and will curtain
the ability of average citizens, like us, to make our views known about the
so-called Free Trade agreements.
Beating Fast Track is important because it is the first step towards
defeating the planned Free Trade Area of Americas. The Free Trade Area of
America's (FTAA) is a multi-national plan to expand NAFTA from Canada to
Argentina. The plan would allow the Presidents of all countries included to
make trade decisions without the consent of their Congresses.
Not only would the FTAA be detrimental to Americans, it would allow foreign
corporations, like Levis and the GAP, to sue the United States government
if they are able to provide proof that some regulation of the United States
limited their profits in some way. If the trial would go to court it would
be up to the American taxpayer to foot the bill if the foreign company won
the case.
President Bush is trying to drive "Fast Track" through Congress right now.
On July 8th, he was quoted as saying, "Creating more jobs and strengthening
our economy are critical priorities. And Congress can act to create jobs by
giving me trade promotion authority. Expanding trade means new jobs for
American workers. Congress has debated trade now for more than a year. It's
time to stop talking; it's time to start acting. Congress should act to
create American jobs before it goes home for the August recess."
Unfortunately, President Bush has it all wrong! Fast Track (and the FTAA)
will not create more jobs for Americans. It will send US jobs abroad, which
will hurt the US economy. It will export sweatshops and low wage jobs to
countries like Mexico and China, where the rights of workers to organize
are not respected. In addition, Fast Track is a blank check for US
corporations to disregard environmental protections in the US, as well as
other countries around the world. We need to urge Congress to uphold
democracy, protect our economy, and our environment by saying NO TO FAST
TRACK!
We need to let the White House and Congress know that we are watching and we
do not want FAST TRACK!!! We need your help to stop it!
Please pass along this e-mail to your family and friends all across the
country. Together we will STOP FAST TRACK once and for all!
For workers and the environment,
Global Exchange
For background info on FAST TRACK, please see:
http://www.globalexchange.org/fasttrack
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WHAT CAN YOU DO?
1. CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE
The AFL-CIO is sponsoring a toll free number for you to express your
opinions to your elected representatives. All you have to do is call
1-877-611-0063 and you will be connected to the Capitol SwitchBoard. You
may ask for your representative by name. You can leave a message with the
voicemail if there is no person to answer the phone. You can also call your
Representative at their District Office.
When you get your Representativešs office, let them know that you want to
convey your OPPOSITION to "Fast Track". Make sure that your Representative
hears that you want them to vote AGAINST Fast Track, and that you strongly
believe the formation of trade policy should be open, transparent and
democratic.
2. MEET WITH YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS
Meet with you member of Congress when they return to your district for the
month of August. Call their office to set up an appointment with them or
their aides.
3. Send Letters to the Editor about Fast Track.
4. ORGANIZE A TOWN HALL MEETING
***FOR MORE BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND IDEAS ON WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STOP FAST
TRACK, PLEASE CHECK OUR WEBSITE AT:
http://globalexchange.org/fasttrack/ or e-mail us at ftaa@globalexchange.org
***YOU CAN NOW DOWNLOAD OUR FAST TRACK ACTION KIT ONLINE AT:
http://www.globalexchange.org/fasttrack/FTToolKit.pdf
You can also check out www.tradewatch.org for more information!
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***ACTION ALERT: NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY, JULY 25 TO STOP FAST TRACK***
JOBS With JUSTICE has put out a call for all to call their representatives
on July 25th. Use the AFL-CIO Call-In # 1-877-611-0063 to CALL YOUR REP.
You can also call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.
For more information on Jobs with Justice check out:
http://www.jobswithjustice.org/
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Fast Track is wrong on number of fronts
By Art Pulaski and Jon Rainwater
COMMENTARY
Posted on Sun, Jul. 14, 2002
LAST YEAR, while corporations were laying off thousands of workers in the
aftermath of Sept. 11, many of their lobbyists were pushing President Bush's
trade legislation known as "Fast Track."
Fast Track, sometimes called trade promotion authority, is a procedure that
reduces Congress members' role in developing trade agreements to voting yes
or no on completed pacts -- while stripping them of the ability to make
amendments. Fast Track is a creature of the Nixon administration, and
emerged at a time when trade policy involved little more than tariffs and
quotas. In today's global economy, however, trade agreements can be complex
and far-reaching, with potential impact on food safety, workers' rights and
the environment.
In December, the Republican House leadership rammed Fast Track trade
authority through Congress by a single vote, using procedural shenanigans
and pork-barrel deals. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, voted against it.
Opponents of Fast Track pointed out the legislation would grant the
president unusually broad authority to negotiate suspect trade agreements.
They also said that by denying Congress its traditional role in forming the
nation's policy, Fast Track removes a key provision of the checks and
balances that drive our system.
Unfortunately, the bill still passed. And as approved, the House version has
serious ramifications for workers, the environment and democracy itself. For
example, the bill expands the NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement)
investment provision known as "Chapter 11," which allows foreign
corporations to sue the state or federal government for their adherence to
laws that protect the public health in the name of profit protection. As
written into NAFTA, Chapter 11 disputes are decided by non-elected,
three-person trade tribunals that are closed to the public. NAFTA panels
have ruled against environment laws in almost all cases, even when required
for international treaty compliance.
Now, corporations are lobbying the Bush administration to expand these
Chapter 11 rights to the entire Western Hemisphere. The administration is
currently in the later stages of negotiating the World Trade Organization's
General Agreement on Trade in Services and the Free Trade Area of the
Americas, which would expand NAFTA to the entire hemisphere beginning in
2005. The expansion of this undemocratic provision could allow many of
California's strong environmental laws to be attacked -- even removed --
through challenges by multinational corporations.
This issue hits close to home: Methanex Corp., a Canadian manufacturer of
the toxic gasoline additive MTBE, is suing the United States for $970
million in one of these NAFTA tribunals. The Legislature banned the additive
after widespread MTBE contamination of drinking water sources became a major
public health concern in the mid-1990s. The company claims that the ban is
an "expropriation" of "future projected profits," and that Californians
should have to pay the polluter to keep the MTBE ban on the books.
Fast Track limped through the Senate in May, so Congress has to reconcile
the versions. The Senate version contained a partial subsidy to enable
workers who lose their jobs through trade to maintain their health
insurance, and expanded the number of workers eligible to receive
assistance.
However, the upper house excluded a large segment of trade-affected workers,
including contract workers, making them ineligible for unemployment benefits
and training as well as health care. This was a particularly painful slight
to high-tech workers, 40 percent of whom are in contract or non-traditional
employment. The House version is even weaker on workers' rights than the
Senate version. The need for protective language is critical, as job loss
due to the flawed NAFTA. According to the Economic Policy Institute, that
agreement has already cost more than 3 million American jobs since 1994 --
310,000 in California alone.
The House leadership has guaranteed there's no chance that improved
protections for workers or the environment will be part of the final trade
package, or that even the inadequate protections contained in the Senate
bill will survive intact. We urge Tauscher to protect workers and the
environment and oppose Fast Track again.
Pulaski is executive secretary treasurer of the California Labor Federation,
AFL-CIO. Rainwater is executive director of the California League of
Conservation Voters.
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There's Only So Much That Foreign Trade Can Do
By Alan Tonelson
Sunday, June 2, 2002; Page B01
America's leaders view trade as a key instrument in the global war on
terrorism. By opening U.S. markets wider to Third World products, they hope
to alleviate poverty abroad and thus turn destitute people away from
terrorism and violence.
Trade policy as anti-terror weapon is an understandably appealing idea. It
doesn't put American soldiers in harm's way. It is nonviolent,
market-friendly and holds the promise of "draining the swamp" where
terrorists are assumed to thrive. And it doesn't require a line in the
federal budget.
If only it worked.
Contrary to the view of globalization supporters and even some critics,
trade with the United States does not automatically provide Third World
workers with the keys to wealth and happiness. In a recent survey, the
Reston-based consulting firm Werner International Inc. has compiled nearly a
decade's worth of hard data on actual wages paid to workers in an industry
that is seen as crucial to Third World hopes for industrialization --
apparel. Perhaps no other industry has profited more from exporting to the
United States. And yet the figures show that there has been almost
uniformwage meltdown in the apparel industry in the Third World.
Take Pakistan, a front-line combatant in the anti-terror campaign that has
complained bitterly about supposedly miserly U.S. trade breaks. Yet from
1990 to 2001, Pakistan's annual apparel exports to the United States rose
nearly 400 percent, to more than $1.5 billion. Nonetheless, between 1990 and
1998, the period covered by the Werner study, nominal wages for Pakistani
apparel workers stayed absolutely flat, at 24 cents per hour. Because
inflation in Pakistan totaled 137 percent from 1990 to 1998, the wages of
apparel workers fell way behind the cost of living.
NATO member Turkey is clamoring for trade breaks, too, as a reward for
buttressing U.S. strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia.Turkey is
already a significant apparel exporter to the United States, with shipments
rising 168 percent between 1990 and 1998, and growing even faster through
2001. Yet from 1990 to '98, while Turkish apparel wages increased by 36.3
percent, the country was gripped by near-hyperinflation that saw living
costs soar by more than 1,800 percent. A similar pattern holds in countries
such as the Philippines, Egypt and Peru. Wage trends for apparel workers are
grim, even allowing for the dollar's appreciation against many local
currencies in the developing world.
In some countries, the pattern extends far beyond the apparel industry.A
1999 report from the Harvard Institute of International Development and the
World Economic Forum revealed falling real wages, in local currency, across
all sectors of the economy in China, Indonesia and the Philippines between
1990 and 1997. This backsliding occurred well before the region's financial
collapse.
All of this contradicts the prevailing theory of the moment. "America's
trade leadership" can help provide answers for Third World allies "who ask
for economic hope to counter internal threats to our common values," U.S.
Trade Representative Robert Zoellickwrote a week after Sept. 11. The virtues
of trade for developing countries have also been endorsed by the World Trade
Organization, the World Bank, Oxfam International and a U.N. anti-poverty
summit.
But in the real world, the answers are anything but clear-cut. In theory,
the solution to developing countries' problems might be to send yet more
apparel to the United States. But the experience, whether from Pakistan,
from Turkey or from Mexico, is not encouraging. Mexico is rapidly becoming
America's largest source of apparel imports -- $9 billion worth in 2001. Yet
Mexican apparel wages have risen less than one-seventh as fast as that
nation's living costs.
Critics of today's trade policies and even supporters who acknowledge the
wage problem offer several plausible explanations, ranging from low
productivity rates in developing countries to a lack of worker rights. Yet
the reasons are more fundamental.
First, greater trade cannot be even a near-panacea for global poverty
because this condition has many other roots. None is more central than bad
and often crooked governance, which prevents scores of developing countries
from organizing themselveswell enough to exploit trade opportunities when
they are offered.
Second, the developing world literally is drowning in labor. The economic
liberalization wave that swept major Third World countries, starting with
China's reform program in the late 1970s, has made an unprecedented number
of workers available to international businesses. In particular, the Asian
and Latin American regions that have opened economically feature not only
huge, rapidly growing populations and workforces, but towering rates of
unemployment -- an estimated 20 percent in China alone. Sub-Saharan Africa
and low-wage East European countries such as Ukraine are waiting in the
wings.
This worldwide labor glut depresses the value of workers the way the
oversupply of any product depresses the price of that product. These
pressures are especially powerful in labor-intensive industries such as
apparel, where international corporations seldom own factories and instead
often shop from country to country for the lowest wages.
Third, the developing world's massive though still incomplete economic
opening has greatly multiplied the number of countries pursuing export-led
growth strategies. During the Cold War, U.S. trade breaks helped South Korea
and Taiwan partly because those nations had the market for Third World
manufacturing exports pretty much to themselves (and partly because they had
strong central governments that instituted sound domestic policies).
Today, such smallish Asian export tigers are competing for shares of the
U.S. apparel markets with neighboring population giants such as China, India
and Indonesia, along with Mexico, the Caribbean Basin, Central America and
sub-Saharan Africa. These countries continuously undercut each other; thus,
most new U.S. trade agreements with Third World regions produce complaints
from other regions.
In part, that's because the U.S. market is already well-saturated with
imports. Imports currently make up at least 75 percent of the U.S. apparel
market, 95 percent of the footwear market, and 95 percent of the market for
computers, other office machines and their parts. Even those unworried about
record and mounting U.S. trade deficits have to ask themselves: How much
more export growth can take place in these areas?
In 1999, despite the surge of exports to the United States, 1.3 billion
people still lived below the meager global poverty line of $1 per day in
income, and nearly 2 billion others made less than $2 per day. Joblessness
was still endemic throughout the developing world.
Despite the fact that increased trade hasn't yet improved the plight of
Third World workers, many remain enamored of trade as an anti-terror weapon.
They might do better to turn their attention from the United States to press
Europeans and the Japanese to start importing much more from developing
countries. Although the globe's lone economic superpower will always be a
lightning rod for economic grievances, the other industrialized countries
have clearly erected the biggest trade barriers to Third World economic
progress.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the
club of industrialized democracies, although the U.S. economy is twice as
big as Japan's, it imports four times more in non-oil goods from 17 major
Third World countries than does Japan. In addition, although the U.S.
economy is 50 percent larger than the output of the European Union's four
biggest countries (Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom), it
imports twice as many goods as they do from those 17 countries.
A 2001 International Monetary Fund (IMF) study concluded that stronger
growth in the United States is not the major reason for the disparity. The
IMF found that U.S. markets are so open to Third World imports that every 1
percent of American economic growth is associated with a 1 percent increase
in Third World growth. By contrast, European and Japanese markets are so
closed that even when they do grow, this growth has no "statistically
significant effect" on Third World growth.
Unfortunately, the Europeans and Japanese have shown little interest in
lowering their barriers. Indeed, Washington may be worsening matters by
hinting that Japan should let the yen slide and try to export its way out of
recession. The result can only make Japan even more closed to Third World
goods.
Absent more burden-sharing, the United States simply will need to bring some
order and strategy to its Third World trade policy by setting priorities. If
President Bush wants to reward allies or lure fence-sitters in the
anti-terror campaign, the kind of practically indiscriminate market-opening
he has favored thus far cannot continue.
Further, the president's anti-terrorism priorities must be reconciled with
other foreign policy considerations that have partly driven recent U.S.
trade policy, such as stemming the flow of drugs and immigrants from Mexico
and other hemispheric neighbors, engaging with China and meeting what the
White House sees as humanitarian obligations toward sub-Saharan Africa. If
every one of these aims is a priority, then none is a priority. Finally, the
president will need to preserve his international legal authority to set
priorities in Third World apparel trade, which will mean confronting an
international agreement to eliminate apparel trade quotas by the year 2005.
If the president fails, much world apparel production is expected to shift
to China.
Above all, the administration must recognize that, for the foreseeable
future, American security cannot responsibly be pinned on seeking millennial
change in the developing world. Trade is not the only economic weapon.
Investment and aid can also help. But even if industrialized nations are
more generous, enormous numbers of people around the world will remain mired
in desperate poverty for decades to come. The swamp that allegedly breeds
and harbors terrorism, in other words, will be drained agonizingly slowly at
best.
Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council
Educational Foundation, is the author of "The Race to the Bottom" (Westview
Press). Kirk Raymond, a foundation research associate, assisted in preparing
this article.
Š 2002 The Washington Post Company
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