Global fairness and the Free Trade Area of the Americas
statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council
Last year, the AFL-CIO launched an ambitious Campaign for Global
Fairness: a multi-year, multi-issue campaign to build international solidarity,
educate our members, incorporate workers' rights into international trade
and investment agreements, and hold corporations accountable for their actions
globally and locally.
This year, we will take our work on global fairness into new
arenas with renewed vigor and focus. We will launch a major campaign, together
with our affiliates, the international trade secretariats, and the International
Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), to ensure that workers worldwide
know the rights they are entitled to under the International Labor Organization's
Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work by posting those
rights in every workplace.
In the weeks leading up to the May 1 launch of the ILO poster,
we will, as part of our effort to localize the movement for global justice,
bring the campaign to cities and towns all over our nation. We will urge that
employers display the poster in all of their facilities worldwide, that state
and local governments and universities insist that all of their contractors
do the same, and we call upon all of our allies to join us in this effort.
We will continue and expand our work to build alliances and
solidarity with our brothers and sisters in developing countries — both
organized and unorganized — to bridge the growing divides in wealth,
education, technology, health, services, and the protection of workers. We
will work domestically to increase funding for deep and meaningful debt relief,
to ensure that the international financial institutions ease up on draconian
structural adjustment policies, and to ensure that governments can limit patent
protection where necessary to protect public health and safety.
This year will also be a crucial turning point in the ongoing
negotiations toward a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the AFL-CIO
will ensure that our members' voices are heard in the debate over the rules
and institutions of hemispheric economic integration. The trade ministers
and heads of state of the Western Hemisphere will hold their Annual Trade
Meeting in Buenos Aires on April 4th and the Summit of the Americas in Quebec
City in mid-April this year. They will be continuing negotiations toward a
trade and investment agreement that will encompass the entire hemisphere (with
the exception of Cuba). This agreement has been under negotiation for several
years, with a projected conclusion date in 2005 (or earlier, if an agreement
can be reached before then).
But this year, the trade bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists
will have company. Our trade union brothers and sisters in the hemisphere
are working with civil society allies to organize teach-ins, corporate tribunals,
and street demonstrations. Trade unionists, environmentalists, students, family
farmers, women, people of faith, and representatives from indigenous communities
will be gathering in the streets, convention halls, churches, and schools
of Buenos Aires and Quebec City to make their voices heard. They are demanding
that any future regional trade or investment pact reflect their concerns —
not just those of the multinational corporations and policy elite of the hemisphere.
The labor unions of the hemisphere (represented by ORIT, the
Western Hemisphere federation of trade unions) are united in calling for a
process of economic integration that respects internationally recognized core
workers' rights, that allows scope for legitimate national development policies,
and that ensures that governments may take appropriate measures to regulate
speculative and destabilizing capital flows.
The AFL-CIO joins with our brothers and sisters of the hemisphere
in demanding an end to the secrecy and exclusivity of the FTAA negotiations.
We join their call for a rejection of the current FTAA and for a new direction
in the negotiations — away from the failed NAFTA model of corporate privilege
and toward a new hemispheric model that prioritizes equitable, democratic,
and sustainable development. We call on our members to make their voices heard
in Quebec City as part of the international actions, and join in activities
to "Localize the Movement for Global Justice" in partnership with Jobs With
Justice and other allies in communities across the country.
The FTAA negotiations have been carried out in excessive secrecy,
and the negotiators have granted privileged access and consideration to corporate
representatives to the exclusion of more representative groups. While labor
unions, environmentalists, and other progressive activists in the hemisphere
have made repeated efforts to communicate their concerns and views to the
negotiators and to their own governments, there is no evidence that any of
these concerns have been addressed in the negotiations to date.
Instead, by all indications, the FTAA is being modeled on the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — a model that, in our view,
has utterly failed to deliver the promised benefits to ordinary citizens in
any of the three North American countries. NAFTA's main outcome has been to
strengthen the clout and bargaining power of multinational corporations, to
limit the scope of governments to regulate in the public interest, and to
force workers into more direct competition with each other — reinforcing
the downward pressure on their living standards, while assuring them fewer
rights and protections. Instead of addressing the severe problems caused by
the NAFTA model, the FTAA instead seeks to extend the most
problematic aspects of NAFTA — the investment measures,
including the corporate right to sue governments. In addition, FTAA negotiators
are likely to incorporate the very broad service sector coverage laid out
in the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which could increase
pressure on governments to privatize public services. And the FTAA negotiators
have resolutely rejected any attempts to place workers' rights or environmental
standards on the agenda.
If the negotiations continue along their current path, they
will yield an agreement that undermines workers' rights and environmental
protections, exacerbates inequality in the hemisphere, and constrains the
ability of governments to regulate in the interests of public health and the
environment. The AFL-CIO vigorously opposes the continuation of an FTAA negotiation
process crafted along these lines. Such a process and any agreement it may
produce will face fierce and broad public opposition in many countries, as
well as in the United States.
In order to provide a new progressive model of trade and development
policy, a hemispheric agreement must incorporate:
• enforceable workers' rights and environmental standards
in its core. For workers in the hemisphere to share the benefits of increased
trade and investment, they must be able to exercise their core workers' rights,
which the International Labor Organization's 1998 Declaration on Fundamental
Principles and Rights at Work identifies as freedom of association, the right
to organize and bargain collectively, and the right to be free from child
labor, forced labor, and discrimination in employment;
• protection under national law and international treaty
obligations for the rights of migrant workers throughout the hemisphere, regardless
of their legal status;
• measures to ensure that countries retain the ability
to regulate the flow of speculative capital in order to protect their economies
from excessive volatility;
• debt relief measures to improve the ability of the developing
countries to fund education, health care, and infrastructure needs, thereby
contributing to closing the gap between rich and poor nations, and reducing
inequality within nations;
• compliance with the "revised drug strategy" adopted
by the World Health Organization, which says that public health should be
paramount in trade disputes;
• equitable and transparent market access rules that allow
for effective protection against import surges; and
• a truly transparent, inclusive, and democratic process,
both for the negotiation of the FTAA and for the implementation of any regional
agreement.
In addition, if there are to be hemispheric negotiations on
investment, services, government procurement, and intellectual property rights,
any resulting agreement must not undermine the ability of governments (at
all levels — federal, state, and local) to enact and enforce legitimate
regulations in the public interest:
• investment rules should not discipline so-called indirect
expropriations, should rely on government-to-government rather than investor-to-state
dispute resolution, and should preserve the ability of governments to regulate
corporate behavior to protect the economic, social, and health and safety
interests of their citizens;
• services rules must be negotiated sector by sector,
must not apply to public services or air transport and related services, must
not undercut regulation of services in the public interest, and must not include
commitments on temporary work visas until these visa programs are revised
to protect the rights of all workers;
• government procurement rules must allow federal, state
and local preferences for domestic purchases to continue and must give governments
scope to serve important public policy aims such as environmental protection,
economic development and social justice, and respect for human and workers'
rights; and
• intellectual property provisions must allow governments
to limit patent protection in order to protect public health and safety, especially
patents on life-saving medicines and life forms.
An acceptable hemispheric agreement must not simply replicate
the failed trade policies of the past, but must incorporate what we have learned
about the problems and weaknesses of the current rules. The success or failure
of any hemispheric trade and investment agreement will hinge on governments'
willingness and ability to develop an economic integration agreement that
appropriately addresses all of the social, economic, and political dimensions
of trade and investment, not just those of concern to corporations.
