STEEL WORKERS TO PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFULS: GET SPECIFIC ON TRADE

Friday, March 21, 2008

(PAI)

By Mark Gruenberg

PAI Staff Writer

PITTSBURGH (PAI)--Steel Workers President Leo Gerard is telling the three remaining presidential hopefuls, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to get specific on trade.

The price they pay for vagueness, he adds, is they may lose Pennsylvania in the April 22 primary or November's general election. There are 175,000 active and retired Steel Workers--not counting family members--in the Keystone State, Gerard said.

Trade was a key issue in the Ohio primary, which Clinton won by casting doubt on Obama's promise to renegotiate NAFTA, the controversial U.S.-Mexico-Canada "free trade" pact pushed through the then-Democratic Congress by Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton (D). McCain had won the GOP nomination by then.

NAFTA led the Teamsters and, later, Change to Win to endorse Obama rather than Clinton. It also led the Steel Workers to endorse former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who is now out of the race. It remains a key issue for workers, Gerard warned.

Clinton favors a "timeout" on future trade pacts that lack labor rights, as NAFTA does. She has not repudiated it. McCain voted for NAFTA and following pacts that lack labor rights, including the GOP Bush regime's Central American Free Agreement.

In letters March 20 to the two Democrats and presumed GOP nominee McCain, Gerard listed seven trade issues he wanted them to address by April 1, and in specifics:

* How to reduce the nation's staggering trade deficit.

* Challenging China's currency manipulation. China now runs the biggest trade surplus with the U.S.

* Enforcement of fair trade laws already on the books. Unions have often pointed out that the anti-worker GOP Bush regime fails to enforce current U.S. trade laws, even while negotiating more trade pacts without worker rights.

* How to toughen food and product safety standards, including supporting liability insurance for importers. Millions of imported toys and tons of imported food from China have had to be recalled due to unacceptably lethal levels of lead, among other things.

* "Demonstrating a commitment to protect human rights by opposing the Colombia Free Trade Agreement." Bush is pushing that trade pact despite the murders of 2,500-plus unionists there in the last 15 years--and the lack of prosecution of the Right Wing paramilitary perpetrators, who sometimes receive "protection" pay from U.S.-based multinationals, to target unionists.

* A commitment to "stop unfair practices such as illegal logging that are costing U.S. workers their jobs and harming the environment."

"More than 3.3 million manufacturing workers have lost jobs and more than 40,000 facilities have closed since 2000 because of failed trade policies," Gerard wrote the three contenders. And a $2 billion daily trade deficit is "an unsustainable imbalance that is mortgaging our economic future," he added.

While the candidates debated NAFTA in Ohio, Gerard said, trade encompasses a lot more than that. It includes a proposed ban on sweatshop imports, and a halt to worker exploitation that costs U.S. workers their jobs and leaves foreign workers ill-paid, unpaid and without rights.

"Workers in this country making $15 per hour--barely $30,000 per year--simply cannot compete with workers in the developing world making 40 cents an hour," Gerard wrote to the three senators. "We will never have a level playing field until our leaders deal with this tremendous gap. Exploitation of workers around the world must be stopped. The standards of living of most of the developing countries must be raised."

Gerard's demands for specifics on trade go far beyond what the candidates have pledged, either on the stump or on their websites:

Clinton, in her economic policy address in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, early this year, promised to: "ensure trade policies work for average Americans.

"Trade policy must raise our standard of living, and they must have strong protections for workers and the environment," she said. Her specifics then included increased enforcement of present trade pacts. She adopted the "timeout" idea, from the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute, later.

Obama has repeatedly promised he would call the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister and tell them NAFTA must be renegotiated to halt the hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs. Clinton dented that commitment in Ohio, however, by quoting an unpaid Obama trade advisor as telling Canada's consul general in Chicago that the phrase was just political rhetoric.

On his website, Obama also promises to "fight for a trade policy that opens up foreign markets to support good American jobs. He will use trade agreements to spread good labor and environmental standards around the world and stand firm against agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement that fail to live up to those important benchmarks." It also say Obama "will pressure the World Trade Organization (WTO) to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and non-tariff barriers on U.S. exports." ###