While we are disappointed in the outcome of yesterday's vote, we emerge from the debate ahead of where we went into it, and focused on the work ahead of us.
The debate showed the force of concerns over human rights and workers' rights and the environment when it comes to trade and investment agreements, and elevated those issues. I believe this vote will be seen as a turning point in trade and investment policy, marking the ripening of international workers' issues and showing that a trade bill cannot be passed in Congress anymore without addressing fundamental human rights. While we know that the Levin-Bereuter proposal is ineffective, the bill would not have passed the House without it.
We also emerge from this vote with our "Seattle coalition" of working men and women, people of faith, environmentalists, students and consumers stronger, and surprisingly, with added momentum for our efforts to reform the global economy to work for working families everywhere. This is a long-term effort, and we're going to win.
As I said yesterday, I believe this vote was a choice between casting a vote dictated by conscience or a vote dictated by corporate money. We stood for what's right, but big money won this round.
While some members struggled with their conscience over the best ways to do the right thing, most were driven by money.
We knew the vote would be uphill from the beginning, and we mounted a forceful and nearly successful challenge to an array of money and forces unlike any previously seen in a lobbying campaign.
We gained significant support from Democrats above the number who have voted no on annual review votes, but we lost Republican support .
The Republican whip operation increased their margin using the argument that passage of this bill would hurt the chances of the candidate we have endorsed for President, Al Gore, and would help Republicans maintain control of the House.
That is one of the issues we have to address immediately.
As I said yesterday, it is sad that the President secured his "legacy" by forging a cynical alliance with the very members of Congress who impeached him and swore to destroy our working families' agenda a year ago.
I am deeply angry that the President working families elected chose to divide progressive elected officials and their core constituencies at a time when we need to be unified and mobilizing around Social Security, health care, education and other crucial working families' issues.
A very real concern is that this debate will depress turnout among working people – especially in districts where representatives voted to scrap annual reviews and grant China permanent normal trade relations. As in the aftermath of the NAFTA vote, it's going to be hard for working men and women not to look at this vote and become more cynical about whether people and principles can pay off in politics – or whether big money is all-powerful.
We know that people-powered politics works, and we're going to work very hard to get average voters re-engaged. That's a big part of what we have to do moving forward.
We're focused on three areas, looking ahead.
First, we have a broad agenda when it comes to making the international economy work for working families. Our China effort has been part of a multi-year, multi-part campaign for global fairness that we will escalate. We certainly accept that workers here in the U.S. are part of a fast-changing global economy. The question is: what are the rules? We believe that if commerce is global, then workers' rights and human rights and environmental protections must also be global.
I am going to the meeting of the ILO - the International Labor Organization – next month where we will push for a major new effort to hold corporations accountable to upholding internationally recognized fundamental human rights. These are rights agreed to by the governments and the employers of the 173 member countries of the ILO. But they are widely violated, and we must work together to insist on respect for these most basic of rights – prohibitions against child labor, slave labor and discrimination, and the freedom to join together with others in a union to have a voice at work.
We will also be expanding our educational work about the issues of globalization here in the United States, and working with trade unions in other countries to do so.
And we will be working harder than ever to build international solidarity around the goal of democratic, sustainable, equitable growth that helps working families everywhere.
If this Congress really wants to do something to assist poor working families around the globe, it should fund our fair share of debt relief for the poorest nations as well as the modest increases proposed by the administration to fight child labor and increase technical assistance to help those countries develop democratic structures and worker protections. We're going to make a major effort to enact this desperately needed relief.
We will expand our efforts in support of high-road economic growth among developing countries through an international labor campaign to assure universal access to information technology including the internet, and by harnessing union pension monies for countries and companies that generate investment return through positive approaches to human rights and broad-based economic development.
And we will accelerate our efforts to reform the international financial institutions, expanding the focus we put on the WTO in Seattle and the IMF and the World Bank here last month.
Second, we have a full agenda of work to do around the urgent issues facing working families here. We heard a lot of talk about national security in recent weeks, but the most profound measure of our national strength lies in the security of our nation's families.
We hope the Clinton-DeLay team will be turning as much time and energy in the coming months to the people's business as they spent on corporate business; they can do that by addressing the crucial issues facing working families.
We have to pass an education bill that funds more teachers for our children, insures high standards and rebuilds our crumbling, inadequate schools.
We have to pass a minimum wage increase and work harder to ensure that no worker lacks a safe, decent job that can sustain a family.
We have to strengthen Social Security, and guarantee the American people that their core retirement benefit will be safe from attacks that would destroy its universal guarantees and undermine retirement security.
And we have to redouble our efforts to be sure that no family should be denied high-quality, affordable health care, that patients have the right to quality care and to add a much-needed prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
We're going to intensify our efforts in the coming weeks around these pressing legislative issues, and those are just a few.
And finally, the third major area is politics.
Looking ahead, we're going to have to take a hard look at how to create a new politics that truly serves working Americans. We're going to work one-on-one with elected officials to show them the impact of corporate-driven globalization up close, and we're going to participate more fully in the candidate selection system. We're already doing that through our 2000 in 2000 program that's creating a seed bed of candidates who understand working family issues, and I think we have to take a look at encouraging more progressive candidates in primary races, looking to 2002. In Los Angeles, union members took to the streets this year and elected Hilda Solis in the Democratic primary to replace Matthew Martinez – they wanted somebody who, in their words, would be "a real warrior for working families."
We're going to push harder for campaign finance reform to counter the impact of big business money – businesses consistently outspend working families about 11 to 1 in cycle after cycle.
And this year, we will mount the biggest effort ever to engage working men and women in judging the records of every single candidate on the issues most important to them, and electing candidates who will stand with them. We will provide information on the issues and on the records of thousands of candidates for public office to union members, and we will undertake the biggest get-out-the-vote campaign ever to involve working people in the elections.