At a press conference held at the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 342 in Concord, Congressmen Garamendi and Miller joined union and trade association leaders to announce their support of the TRADE ACT of 2009. The focus was on the broad sweep of the Act rather than to discuss or explain the details of it. Currently the Bill (#3012) has 134 Co-Sponsors including George Miller, and now John Garamendi, and was universally described as being a very hard fight to be brought to the floor and passed.
Both Miller and Garamendi emphasized that the Bill would require a relook at all trade agreements. Being targeted here was NAFTA and the WTO, both of which were opposed by Miller, who made it clear that “they were a bad idea then and they are a bad idea now.” Labor Representatives and Miller echoed that the promise of better jobs with NAFTA has not occurred on either side of U.S. borders. Union speakers posed that NAFTA has benefitted only the greed of top owners of the businesses, and all that was done is to export good jobs in the U.S. to poverty level jobs overseas, where workers’ conditions were steeped in abuse.
Garamendi called for a “military procurement” sort of restrictions on government purchases. He sees this as a way to force items to be made in America to return jobs and recreate industries here. He used as an example the replacement of BART trains saying that the trains as well as the replacement trains in NY and elsewhere should be done by “Government Motors” and built here. (The last set of BART trains came from France).
The theme of Buy American was also picked up by labor reps presented including the dock workers (ILWU) which said that while traffic into the ports was good for ILWU, it was of no comfort to know that people do not have the jobs to buy the things that are now all being made overseas.
In mentioning the proposed Columbian Free Trade deal in Congress, Miller also talked about the killings of union organizers in Columbia, highlighting actions of the government in conjunction with business management to destroy worker rights advocacy, saying that over 2,700 people have been killed trying to organize workers in that country.
The TRADE Act 2009 bill calls for the establishment of goals in American Trade Agreements to require participating countries to insure worker rights and, by direct reference, the entire U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Man as a goal of the U.S. Trade negotiation.
Briefly touched upon, but very critical in the impact of the Bill, is that it would halt future reinstatement of “fast tracking” of trade bills started under the Nixon Administration and thus opens future trade bills to the full in depth review and discussion by the Congress who could amend the treaty. This prospect would certainly have trade negotiators reaching for Prozac as the combination of 400+ constituents lobby groups and power blocks try to get their own piece of all trade deals. That whirlwind of back channel dealing is what forced us to go to the Up and Down method of the Fast Track in the first place.
Repeated in its various forms, the message was that the movement of Free Trade in the last 20 years has resulted in negatives for the U.S. Worker, and that both Miller and Garamendi want a focus on Fair Trade and the use of the Trade Agreements as a means to better the worker conditions in the signatory countries.
Bill Gram-Reefer is Editor & Publisher of Halfway To Concord, founded in 2004. Halfway To Concord is the leading online source for community-driven political news, events, and opinion for Contra Costa County and the San Francisco East Bay.
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Dangerous protectionism is alive and well in the Democratic Party (and the Republican Party). Why don’t American protectionists stop the import of petroleum? Answer: protectionist politicians are afraid to face constituents screaming about gasoline that costs $10 a gallon. In September 2009, the Obama Adminsistration put a 35% tariff on tires imported from China. Why not leave decisions on the purchase of tires to consumers? Consumers do not need to have government make decisions for them. If the protectionist wing of the Democratic Party wants a “buy American” policy, why not ban the import of cars like the Lexus? If government did ban the Lexus, it would be banning the car that received, from Consumer Reports (April 2009 issue) , the highest rating of any car available in America. To reactionary, protectionist politicians, we all should say: “Let us make up our own minds. We are not children.” And, by the way, such Democratic presidents as Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton were all in favor free trade.
Richard S. Colman
Orinda, CA
January 12, 2010
The examples of Toyota and Siemens does not support the argument. These decisions were made not in the environment of Free Trade but the opposite where the combined transportation costs and the home (Japan for Toyota) manufacture costs were uneconomical to penetrate the US market. Now we are seeing places like NUMI in Fremont closing down and Hummer production planned for China.
The increase in US jobs after NAFTA was not as a direct result in NAFTA but from other concurrent situations and furthermore the argument that it decreased our middle class seems to be born out by the large widening of the gap between the bottom and the top in America over the last 10 years.
The three aspects of this bill- Re-do’s of Treaties, End to Fast Track, Social-Rights in trade policy are all very relevant to labor. You may not like their positions but there should be no doubt that they are relevant.
As former House Majority Leader Dick Armey — an economist by trade — put it: “Demagoguery beats data in making public policy.”
Screaming about Fair Trade is a fallacy.
According to Thomas Sowell, “Everyone has heard the claim that a high-wage country like the U.S. loses jobs to low-wage countries when there is free trade. When the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect a decade ago, there were dire predictions of “a giant sucking sound” as American jobs were drawn away, to Mexico especially.
“In reality, the number of jobs in the U.S. increased by millions after Nafta went into effect and the unemployment rate fell to low levels not seen in years. Behind the radically wrong predictions was a simple confusion between wage rates and labor costs.
“Wage rates per unit of time are not the same as labor costs per unit of output. When workers are paid twice as much per hour and produce three times as much per hour, the labor costs per unit of output are lower. That is why high-wage countries have been exporting to low-wage countries for centuries. An international study found the average productivity of workers in the modern sector of the Indian economy to be 15% of that of American workers. In other words, if you paid the average Indian worker one-fifth of what you paid the average American worker, it would cost you more to get the job done in India.
“In particular industries, such as computer software, Indian workers are more comparable, which is why there is so much outsourcing of computer work to India. But virtually every country has a comparative advantage in something, whether it is a high-wage country or a low-wage country.
“Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the U.S. Management guru Peter Drucker has said that this country imports far more jobs than it exports and no one has contradicted him. Indeed, those who are loudest in denouncing the exporting of jobs totally ignore the importing of jobs.”
That governments attack labor organizers is irrelevant to the economic policy debate, it is a matter of law enforcement. We cannot legislate law enforcement for other countries or dictate that low skilled laborers in Bangladesh make the same amount as low-skilled SEIU employees in the. U.S.
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