CAFTA-FTAA fallout

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[the question........still, is whether US unions can help contruct a
global social movement unionism that links with all the other social
movements of century 21........]

CAFTA: The Coming Free Trade Fight
By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, December 11, 2003; 10:58 PM
Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desde@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


U.S. labor leaders want to delay another effort by the Bush administration
to expand free trade -- and this time they think they can succeed. They
are taking their case to the public in an effort to make quick passage of
a U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) politically risky and
vulnerable in Congress.

They don't have much choice. Unable to directly influence negotiations,
labor leaders can only sit back and watch as trade officials from Costa
Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua meet here this week
with their U.S. counterparts in what they hope will be the final round of
talks before signing the accord. After that, the administration will
present the agreement to Congress for approval.

When President Bush ended tariffs on imported steel that were intended to
give the U.S. industry time to retool for world competition, he insisted
that U.S. "workers can compete with anyone in the world as long as (they)
have a fair and level playing field." Those words were bitter to labor's
ears, and more so in the context of agreements like CAFTA.

Such groups as the AFL-CIO, the Washington Office on Latin America and
Human Rights Watch don't see a level playing field across the Americas.
Indeed, they assert that CAFTA, like NAFTA before it, does little to
address the region's wage disparities and "fundamentally flawed'' labor
laws that make the field so uneven.

U.S. manufacturing continues in decline, and those jobs will keep sliding
out of the country and to places where workers earn a little more than a
dollar an hour.

While it is true that some countries constitutionally recognize workers'
rights to organize without discrimination, the worker advocates argue that
enormous loopholes prevent that from happening in Central America. Human
Rights Watch reported last week that in El Salvador, union members face
all sorts of hurdles, from "excessively burdensome'' red tape required to
join unions, to anti-union hiring practices.

U.S. and Salvadoran officials counter that in order to comply with CAFTA,
the Salvadoran government has raised funding by 20 percent to enforce
labor laws and to increase the numbers of inspectors in the workplace.
Still, labor activists say, improved enforcement does little to raise the
bar in a region where labor laws are well below international standards.

U.S. labor leaders also take issue with reports that the Bush
administration is spending aggressively in Central America to sell CAFTA
as a windfall for all parties involved.

"If indeed this is U.S. taxpayers' money that is going to underwrite this
campaign, they are underwriting a very unilateral position which is not
necessarily the opinion of the American public," said Stan A. Gacek,
international affairs assistant director for the AFL-CIO.

A U.S. official, however, defended the effort, funded through the U.S.
Agency for International Development, as a move to help Central American
governments do their own outreach. If anything, the official said, civil
societies should welcome such attempts to make governments in the region
more open to public opinion and dissent.

Both the Bush administration and the union advocates are struggling
mightily to win this one. The administration needs CAFTA to keep the
process of hemispheric-wide integration alive. Labor leaders and their
allies see stopping CAFTA in Congress as their best chance yet to block
"irresponsible trade agreements."

Some form of free trade is coming to Central America, there is no doubt.
And despite growing popular skepticism in the region, regional experts
remain convinced that free trade agreements are essential to exert
constructive pressure on governments to do what is necessary to reform and
help their industries become competitive.

If labor's delaying tactics succeed, the burden will be on these activists
to prove that their interest was not just to protect U.S. workers, as
free-traders claim. It is hard to imagine that CAFTA could be equally
beneficial to workers here and there. But it is also hard to see how, at
least in the short term, the interests of Central American workers would
be served by an agreement that does little more than slap the hand of
abusive employers.

An immediate delay will only deny Central America both the benefits and
drawbacks of free trade. Without a plan to improve CAFTA, the drawbacks
will remain. Sure, there can be maneuvers to protect workers. But in light
of the steel tariff reversal, it's apparent that even a gift to labor can
be taken away.




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To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for
originality. There aren't any. [Les Paul]