From: Mike Dolan <mdolan at citizen.org> To: Multiple recipients of list TW-LIST <tw-list at essential.org> Subject: AFL-CIO on the WTO
Our brothers and sisters in organized labor are engaged in a high-stakes PR war with the Big Business forces of evil.
This just in.
Mike Dolan Public Citizen | Internet: mdolan at Citizen.ORG ______________
TO: AFL-CIO Executive Council Members and National Union Presidents FR: John J. Sweeney DT: October 28, 1999 RE: ACTPN LETTER ON WTO
I want to make sure you have a copy of a recent letter from the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations (ACTPN) to President Clinton that is being widely mis-reported, due in no small part to hard work by the Chamber of Commerce. I urge caution in dealing with the press at a time when so many of our opponents are working to twist this; George Becker was flagrantly misquoted in today's USA Today.
Jay Mazur, Lenore Miller and I serve on the ACTPN, along with about 30 CEOs, business representatives and others. After participating in an extended series of discussions with business members of ACTPN (with significant national union staff consultation), Jay and I thought it was important to get what is unprecedented business support for a discussion of workers' rights at the WTO on the record. While this is at best a tiny installment on our long-range goals, it is a sharp departure from previous business arguments that workers' rights have no place at the WTO. Lenore declined to sign the letter.
The letter, which was nearly derailed by intense last-minute corporate opposition, expresses "broad support" for the U.S. negotiating agenda for the Seattle ministerial, but it also states clearly that "all of our members are not in agreement on every element of this agenda." The AFL-CIO supports some elements of the U.S. agenda in Seattle: seeking to establish a working group on trade and labor, taking steps to make the WTO more transparent and accountable (including timely de-restriction of documents and opening dispute settlement panels to the public), seeking to address environmental problems, and clearly rejecting any efforts by other WTO members to reopen the Antidumping Agreement. The AFL-CIO does not support other elements of the U.S. agenda, such as efforts to open new service sectors to international trade and major new negotiations on market access in the absence of progress on workers' rights.
Our position on the WTO is the one that is expressed forcefully and in some detail in Convention Resolution # 6, "New Rules for the Global Economy," which was passed unanimously by the delegates in Los Angeles. A copy of the convention resolution is attached.
Our critique of the WTO and the world trading system is both broad and deep, and our demands in Seattle are strong: we want the WTO to incorporate enforceable rules protecting workers' rights and the environment, to open up its operations to give workers and other civil society representatives a meaningful voice, and to significantly overhaul its rules on safeguard protections and the overturning of legitimate national regulations on public health and the environment. We have been very clear that we do not want the WTO to initiate any new negotiations on investment, competition policy, or government procurement (other than transparency-enhancing measures).
We are taking immediate steps to rectify the confusion and mischaracterization of the ACTPN letter. The attached press statement is also being released today, and we have an aggressive plan to seek a fuller understanding of our position by the media prior to Seattle. Among other things, I will speak at a National Press Club luncheon on November 19th.
I believe that getting the business community to agree to support a working group on trade and labor is a significant accomplishment -- one made possible only by the hard work your unions and the federation did together to defeat fast track twice in two years and our continuing insistence that the interests of workers be addressed in trade and investment negotiations. Significant elements of the business community clearly recognize that there will be no forward movement in any trade arena until they begin to address the substantive concerns we in the labor community have raised so successfully over the last decade.
Similarly, the Clinton Administration is devoting significant resources and a much higher priority to raising workers' rights concerns at the WTO this year. They do so only because they understand that failure to address these concerns will guarantee continued stalemate in trade policy. We continue to work closely with national labor centers in other countries to coordinate pressure on their governments, and we feel that momentum is on our side on the workers' rights issues. Nonetheless, we face tremendous obstacles and many hostile governments at the WTO, and that is why it seemed so important to Jay and me to lock in the support of the business community on the workers' rights agenda.
But our concerns go beyond workers' rights, and progress on workers' rights will, even under the best of circumstances, be slow. We have redoubled our efforts to organize a massive mobilization in Seattle on November 30, with your help. We now have 22 organizers on the ground in Seattle, as well as a number of senior staff here in Washington, working day and night to assure a strong labor turnout, educate our members, and keep our message in the press.
We are working closely with union leaders from around the world, as well as allies in the religious, environmental, and development communities to ensure a broad-based, internationalist presence in Seattle, one that will signal to the WTO, assorted trade ministers, and our own government that our issues are not going away, that they are shared by people all over the world, and that the current set of global rules is simply unacceptable. We are confident that we will have a great labor turnout on November 30th, and that the 20,000 voices joined around our demands will be yet another reminder of our strength and determination.
I hope I can count on the enthusiastic support of you and your members as we approach the Seattle ministerial.
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