NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | April 19, 2019 | PAGE 7
...Trump’s new NAFTA: Is America’s trade policy at a crossroads?
From Page 1
“fast-track” rules that let presi-
dents negotiate trade deals Con-
gress can’t amend. In response to
that last vote, the national AFL-
CIO sent a mailer to Blume-
nauer’s constituents saying he
“sold out,” and the local AFL-
CIO stopped inviting him to its
annual labor day picnic.
But Blumenauer was never a
full-on free-trader. He voted
against three NAFTA-style deals
— the ones with Colombia,
Oman, and Central America.
NAFTA and its children were
never popular with the Ameri-
can public, not even with the
Republican base. But it wasn’t
until Trump that any national
Republican leader defied the
party’s free-trade, pro-NAFTA
consensus. In office, Trump ap-
pointed Reagan-era trade nego-
tiator Robert Lighthizer and sent
him to Mexico and Canada to
negotiate a re-write of NAFTA.
The agreement they worked
out— dubbed U.S. Mexico
Canada Agreement (USMCA)
by Trump — has yet to be ap-
proved by Congress. That’s
where Blumenauer comes in.
With Democrats back in
AFL-CIO trade policy specialist Celeste Drake, at Blumenauer’s March 26 hearing on trade:
“A
merica’s working families support trade, but not unconditional
trade. The rules of trade matter. These rules should be structured to
promote good jobs, high wages, a clean and sustainable environment, re-
sponsible employers, and a responsive government. The trade deals and
policies enacted in the United States over the past 25 years have generally
missed this mark by a long shot. The corporate privileges enshrined in some
U.S. deals create not free trade, but rigged trade, a set of incentives that pro-
mote outsourcing, higher drug prices, labor exploitation and environmental
abuse, and limit the ways we can regulate banks and label food. ”
charge of the House, Blumenauer
won appointment to chair the
trade subcommittee of the House
Ways and Means Committee.
The Ways and Means Committee
will have a role to play whenever
Trump sends the USMCA to
Congress for a vote under the fast
track rules.
Trump told Republican leaders
March 26 that he wants a vote on
it by summer; it’s thought that
he’ll need at least 30 House De-
mocrats to join with Republicans
in order to pass it.
In his conversation with
Chamberlain, Blumenauer said
he wants to work closely with la-
bor leaders on trade policy.
Blumenauer had lunch in
early March with national AFL-
CIO President Richard Trumka
and at least half a dozen national
union leaders who are members
of the government’s official La-
bor Advisory Committee for
Trade Negotiations and Trade
Policy. The takeaway: The labor
leaders see Trump’s deal as an
improvement over the existing
NAFTA, but also say it’s still
not good enough.
To hear more about labor’s
perspective, Blumenauer invited
a panel of labor’s trade experts
to the new subcommittee’s first
hearing, on March 26. Opening
the hearing, Blumenauer said
trade policy is at a crossroads.
To regain public confidence, the
United States must toughen en-
forcement of the labor and envi-
ronmental commitments Amer-
ica’s trading partners made in
the existing trade agreements.
Blumenauer told the Labor
Press by phone April 9 that he
and other committee Democrats
will push the Trump administra-
tion to go back and negotiate
tougher labor and environmental
standards in the pending agree-
ment. In USMCA, Mexico com-
mitted to improving its labor laws
to end the institution of company-
dominated unions, unelected by
workers, that sign agreements
workers had no say in. But the
Mexican Congress hasn’t passed
the reforms, and Blumenauer
wants them to do that before the
House passes the USMCA.
Blumenauer and other Ways
and Means Committee Democ-
rats said as much in an April 11
letter to Lighthizer, Trump’s
chief trade negotiator.
“More than 25 years ago,
when Congress looked at taking
up NAFTA, House Democrats
had deep and abiding concerns,”
says the letter. “They included
apprehension that the elimina-
tion of duties, coupled with a
lack of worker protections in
Mexico, could lead to the dete-
rioration of wages, competitive-
ness, and opportunities for
American workers.”
Could USMCA be modified?
You might think having been
signed by Mexico and Canada
that it’s a done deal, and Con-
gress tied its own hands with
fast track, which says it can’t
amend it but only vote it up or
down. But there’s precedent for
further tweaks, Blumenauer
says — the so-called “May 10
agreement” which Nancy Pelosi
crafted when Democrats took
the House for the final two years
of Bush Jr.’s second term. That
agreement led Bush back to the
bargaining table, where he got
several trading partners to agree
to further improvements.