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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (July 16, 2021)
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | July 16, 2021 | PAGE 7 Who’s on our side? By Graham Trainor Oregon AFL-CIO President Honoring the life of Sebastian Francisco Perez Sebastian Francisco Perez: A 38 year old farmworker, husband, brother, and son went to work at Ernst Nursery and Farms in St. Paul, Oregon in the midst of the record- setting heat wave on Saturday, June 26, but the promise of a safe return at the end of his shift was broken. The loss of Mr. Perez the day after his 38th birthday was shameful, heartbreaking, preventable, and highlights—yet again—the com- plex and diverse dangers that so many workers face today when they punch the clock. Mr. Perez was a Guatemalan im- migrant who was working hard in Oregon’s nursery industry to save money to become a father and start a family. He was one of nearly 200,000 migrant and seasonal farm- workers in Oregon who have faced one of the most dangerous and deadly years imaginable—heat, cold, historic wildfires, all during a global pandemic. Oregon’s labor movement and worker advocates in every corner of the state mourn the loss of Mr. Perez and send our heartfelt condolences to his family. We also recommit to and redouble our fight for safe workplaces for every worker, as well as adequate protections for the complex and changing hazards facing so many Oregonians on the job. This loss is unacceptable, and we must do more. While we’ve been encouraged by the recent emergency rule adopted by Oregon-Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) aimed at ensuring workplaces are safe from high heat, this 180-day emergency temporary standard is not enough to address these long- term workplace dangers. That’s why our focus will remain on securing a strong and enforceable permanent workplace protection rule for work- ers exposed to extreme heat and smoke as we continue to face in- creasingly harsh summer heat and wildfire seasons. Farmworkers, let- ter carriers, construction workers, warehouse workers, and any worker who is exposed to these types of dramatic and dangerous conditions are counting on us to keep fighting. It’s hard to think of a time when the intersectionality between the struggles for justice at work and the fight for climate justice has been more obvious than these past few weeks as we’ve reeled from the dev- astation of these recent extreme heat events. Our climate is changing, our economy is changing, and work- places are changing. That means the decisions that policy makers and regulators make on workplace safety standards and worker protec- tion laws must keep up while also ensuring that our state agencies have the capacity to enforce these stan- dards and laws. As the saying goes, a law is only as good as it is able to be enforced. The loss of Mr. Perez on June 26 should never have happened. The news about Ernst Nursery and the farm labor contractor who he worked for was also disturbing. Both of these employers had re- peated OSHA violations on their records, multiple worker safety complaints had been filed, and the federal Department of Labor had even fined the labor contractor for failing to provide safety information to workers. Because our state agen- cies currently lack the enforcement capacity needed to truly protect workers and because employers with health and safety violations are often fined so little—if at all— there is no real incentive for them to do what it takes to keep workers safe. As this recent extreme heat event and last year’s historic wildfire sea- son become more the rule than the exception, workers need and expect more from our state government. Pushing back on employers look- ing to protect their bottom line at the expense of worker safety is never easy, but the loss of Mr. Perez should be our state’s constant re- minder of the moral imperative we have to always do more, always keep pushing, and never stop fight- ing for the life-saving worker pro- tections that can help our state guar- antee that fundamental yet essential promise we must make to every worker and their family to keep them safe. The Oregon AFL-CIO is a 138,000-member- strong federation of labor unions. July 1, the day ‘Free trade’ died ITC says 40 years of trade deals didn’t help much. Our assessment: They accelerated the loss of American manufacturing. By David Groves, Communications Director, Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO NAFTA. CAFTA. WTO. FTAA. TPP. If you’re a labor activist, those acronyms conjure up decades of pitched battles with lawmakers of both parties over so-called “free trade” agreements. Do they create millions of jobs and benefit the U.S. econ- omy, as promised by Republican and Democratic presidents alike? Or do they kill jobs by making it easier to offshore them to low-wage countries? The debate has been especially divisive in Washington state, regularly touted as the most trade-dependent state in the na- tion. Pundits and politicians have contin- ually conflated principled opposition to free trade agreements with ignorant, self- defeating protectionism. Over the years, it has caused significant rifts between the state’s labor movement and its Demo- cratic members of Congress. On July 1, the president’s Trade Promo- tion Authority (TPA) expired. That means trade deals can no longer be negotiated by the White House and submitted to Con- gress for a straight up-or-down vote with- out amendment. Anticipating a debate on whether to re- new that authorization—previously known as “fast track” and long opposed by unions for helping to ram these trade deals through—Congress commissioned the U.S. International Trade Commission to study nearly four decades of TPA-ne- gotiated trade deals. They wanted an an- swer: Have these deals actually boosted U.S. jobs and the economy? On June 29, the ITC report was quietly released. The answer? Not much, if at all. The ITC report concluded that TPA-ne- gotiated trade deals have had a “small, positive effect” on U.S. economic growth and employment, but that these slight ben- efits “were not distributed evenly, with the biggest gains estimated for college-edu- cated male workers.” The report found that 40 years of these trade pacts had in- creased U.S. economic output by $88.8 billion, or just 0.5% of the nearly $23 tril- lion U.S. economy, and they boosted over- all U.S. employment by 485,000 full-time equivalent jobs, or just 0.3%. But importantly, one big free trade deal outside the ITC report’s scope was the agreement struck by the United States to pave the way for China to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001. That deal has been blamed for the loss of about 5 mil- lion U.S. manufacturing jobs over the fol- lowing decade, a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” So in the aggregate, free trade policies have likely cost the U.S. millions of jobs with negligible economic benefit, just as organized labor has argued all along. In the short term, it means TPA negoti- ation authority will be allowed to lapse and the Biden administration will not be incentivized to negotiate new trade deals, unless they are capable of serious Con- gressional scrutiny. But the long-term economic and polit- ical consequences are incalculable. Free trade deals have accelerated the loss of America’s manufacturing base, jeopard- izing our nation’s readiness to deal with everything from a major military conflict to a global pandemic. Plant closures due to offshoring have devastated communi- ties throughout the nation, particularly in the Rust Belt states that handed Donald Trump the presidency. Democratic candi- dates have struggled to regain the confi- dence of the working-class voters who were once their base, but could see with their own eyes that the promises of free trade were a lie. As trade deals’ benefits flowed mainly to corporations and white-collar workers, their consequences were borne by the working class. Anyone really paying attention has known for some time now that — as local trade guru Stan Sorscher likes to say—the old free trade approach is exhausted so- cially, politically, and economically. Now it’s official. Free trade died July 1—with a whimper. Good riddance.
