Labor Announces its own Agenda for the WTO

The AFL-CIO and the other union federations in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions have an alternative agenda for the WTO summit, and they intend to mobilize tens of thousands of people to show support for that alternative agenda.

The AFL-CIO is calling for:

• A halt to expansion of the WTO until its existing effects on income distribution, economic development and financial instability throughout the world can be assessed.

• The addition of core workers’ rights and environmental protections to the WTO’s rules, along with effective enforcement procedures. These core workers’ rights would include freedom of association, the right to organize and bargain collectively, prohibition of forced labor, a minimum age for the employment of children, and prohibition on discrimination in employment.

• A way to stop WTO rules from undermining legitimate national regulations protecting public health, the environment, and social programs.

• Preservation of the right of governments at all levels to protect human and labor rights by withdrawing benefits from countries that fail to guarantee and enforce them.

• Stricter admissions standards to ensure that new WTO members are in compliance with core workers’ rights.

• Reforms to improve the transparency and accountability of WTO proceedings and ensure access to the WTO’s dispute settlement process by unions and other citizen organizations.

Public Demanding Protection of Workers’ Rights

Don McIntosh, Northwest Labor Press

As awareness spreads about the WTO’s impacts, the world public is increasingly critical of the way in which this unelected and unaccountable body is asserting its jurisdiction over questions formerly reserved to democratic governments to decide. "We don’t need a trading system telling us whether we have the right to ban asbestos," declares Thia Lee, the AFL-CIO’s top expert on public policy. "The rules are being drawn in the wrong place."

Because workers’ rights (other than prison labor) are not included in WTO rules, countries may not withdraw trade preferences from WTO members even for serious violations of workers’ rights. If the United States were to ban the import of goods made with child labor, for example, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has proposed, other countries could challenge this ban under WTO rules.

At the 1996 WTO summit in Singapore, trade ministers from all member countries committed their governments to observe core labor standards, but they also asserted that the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency with no enforcement power, was the proper place to deal with the question. The most effective way to protect workers’ rights would be through a worldwide trading system that rewards or penalizes products depending upon how they are produced. For example, when companies use child labor and when governments repress independent unions, their goods would be subject to tariffs or import bans that would eliminate the profit gained by violating workers’ rights. Such a multilateral trading system, enforced by the WTO, would remove the financial incentive for companies or governments to violate workers’ rights.

Nothing of that kind will be proposed in Seattle. Instead, a U.S. proposal to form a "working group" on trade and labor standards will be discussed. If the proposal wins support from other WTO member nations, the working group would study the relationship between trade and employment, social policy, and core labor standards. It would also look at incentives to encourage adoption and enforcement of labor standards. And it would study what happens when countries lower labor standards to attract trade. It would issue a report in two years.

"It falls far short of establishing workers’ rights in the WTO," says Barbara Shailor, director of foreign affairs for the national AFL-CIO. "It is a modest step forward in what we consider a long campaign." The labor working group proposal has the support of the European Union and South Africa, but Shailor said there is significant opposition to a step even this modest from the governments of Pakistan, India, Mexico, Egypt, and many Asian countries (though the workers movements in those countries support it.) It also has the endorsement of the AFL-CIO.

Oct. 29, USA Today and other newspapers reported that AFL-CIO President John Sweeney had joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in supporting the Clinton administration’s entire agenda at the WTO. This prompted UAW President Stephen Yokitch to resign as chair of the AFL-CIO Manufacturing and Industrial Committee in protest. In fact, say AFL-CIO officials, Sweeney endorsed only Clinton’s proposal on the labor working group, not the whole agenda, which would expand the WTO’s free trade influence to other sectors.

Shailor said to keep the pressure for workers’ rights protections, the world’s labor movement will have to mobilize heavily in Seattle and continue to be active afterward as well.

In Seattle, Ron Judd, head of the King County Labor Council, compared trying to influence the global trading system with trying to turn around a supertanker—it’s slow and it’s a lot of work, but it CAN be done.

Don McIntosh, Northwest Labor Press

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