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By Christa Hillstrom and Kristen Beifus Last week, President Obama submitted to Congress no fewer than three "hangover" free trade agreements (FTA's) originally negotiated by the Bush administration. All three bills have been widely opposed by labor organizations, environmental groups, human rights activists, and others for their strong likelihood of offshoring U.S. jobs, further deregulating the corporate sector, hurting the livelihoods of farming communities, and ignoring labor and environmental standards and human rights. They are expected to be voted on Wednesday. Since negotiations on it first began, more than 700,000 South Koreans have protested the largest of the three pending agreements, the U.S.-Korea Trade Agreement, or KORUS. The Koreans have long been out en masse, says Kim Kyung-Ran of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, because they believe people on both sides of the Pacific will lose if the agreement passesa reality workers across the world have come together to fight. In January, Kim came to the U.S. to share with labor organizers efforts to stop the agreement by the 40,000 members or her Confederation. In 2006, when negotiations were held in Seattle, 60 Korean labor activists joined more than one thousand local labor, Korean solidarity, and social justice advocates to rally for trade deals that promote prosperity for people, not just business. With agreements like KORUS and the otherswith Panama and Colombiait's transnational companies that stand to gain the most. They regularly benefit from the reduced tariffs FTA's offer: First, they move production to countries with lower wages and fewer established labor rights and environmental regulations, then sell these goods back to the wealthier market they left; and second, they are able to sell less expensive products duty-free to countries that make the same products (in Mexico, corn, a highly subsidized U.S. surplus crop). Right now, tens of thousands of Americansfrom New York to Seattle to St. Louisare in the streets for a related reason: standing up to the control corporations have over the political process. Perhaps nowhere is this manipulation better exemplified than in the realm of global trade. In the past 20 years, the U.S. has consistently instated international trade policies that secure the rights of corporations over those of workers and indigenous communities; that protect intellectual property, but not farmers' land, workers' health, or communities' water and air; that appropriate taxpayer money to bolster industries that shift production overseas, leaving a wake of unemployment at home. It would be easy for those whose jobs are affected to blame workers in other countries, or even workers in other industries less directly impacted by trade policy. But we are all impacted in
some way, and in coming together to demand a say in trade negotiation, labor unions, faith-based organizations, social justice groups, farmers, educational institutions, migrant workers, small and mid-sized business owners, and workers in both organized and unorganized sectors have realized their similarities outweigh their differences.
About 40 miles north of Seoul, and 10 miles over the border with North Korea, is a complex of sweatshops where 44,000 North Korean workers labor in factories for as little as 25 cents an hourabout half of which is directly paid to the North Korean state. This, the Kaesong Industrial Complex, is a South Korean free trade zone, where 120 corporations like Hyundai use disgracefully cheap labor to manufacture products intended for exportexports that may soon enter the U.S. duty-free. On top of that, KORUS' "Rule of Origin" states that fully two-thirds of a product can be made outside of the country and still have the label "Made in Korea," entering the U.S. without tariffs.
Good on Paper
Greg Palleson, now vice president of the Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers Union, worked at a paper mill in Longview, Wash., before it closed and the machine he operated was put on a barge and shipped to China. Since the early 1980s, the Association has seen its ranks decline from 24,000 members to about 5,000. They have worked tirelessly to bring attention to the condition of the paper industry, where hard-fought-for environmental reforms on processing, treatment and disposal of paper byproducts, and workers' rights have literally been rolled back with each U.S. mill that relocates to China. When Greg later visited China to see the transplanted mills, he saw that the workers were not really benefiting from the outsourced jobs, and neither were the surrounding communities: Paper mills have been identified as the largest source of pollution in Chinas rural environment. According to Greg, a Chinese mill worker received about one dollar an hour, with no pension or benefits. Their skilled American counterparts are paid almost thirty times that, plus health care and a pension. Lack of adequate health care makes it all the more worrisome that Chinese workers are regularly exposed to unregulated toxic wastewater effluents. Trade policy has the ugly effect of pitting workers around the world against one another. But when we talk to each other and see that neither side is actually benefiting, we start to wonder, who is? After all, if it's not working for you, and it's not working for me, it must be working for someone. This questioning opens the door to systemic change. We need to continue to build and nourish natural alliancesacross industries, across countries, across unions; between faith, farm, and migrant communities; among students and small and medium businessesso our voices are at the decision-making table ensuring that trade policy benefits our communities. The FTA's being considered this week by our leaders lack the voices of the 159,000 Americans like Greg who will lose their jobs in the worst economy in decades; of the small farmers in countries without subsidies to fall back on when foreign grains flood their market; of the laborers in the Kaesong Industrial Complex, which is slated to expand to 6,000 acres; of Colombia's imperiled labor unionists, 22 of whom have been murdered already this year. It is we the peoplenot we the corporationswho should drive the vote on trade.
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/tricks-tradedeals-1318392293. All rights are reserved.