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.