Bring Jobs Home: Don’t let TPP Become the Next NAFTA

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Global-Action/Bring-Jobs-Home-Don-t-let-TPP-Become-the-Next-NAFTA

07/06/2012

Celeste Drake



The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, sounds like a friendly little cooperative endeavor, doesn't it? Or maybe a new kind of bathroom tissue? Well, it's neither of those things. It's a proposed "free trade agreement," like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), but with 11 countries instead of three. The negotiations, held at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, brought out almost 200 union members along with allies from Occupy San Diego, La Fuerza Unida, Friends of the Earth and other groups on Monday to express concern about the possible ramifications to their jobs, their families and the American economy. Trade negotiators from the U.S. were at the Hilton all week working on the negotiations with representatives from Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. Mexico and Canada were recently added to the TPP—but have not yet participated in the talks.

So-called "free trade agreements" have been the favorite tool of multi-national corporations over the last 20 years to promote an agenda of weakening labor law enforcement and degrading the environment while promoting big bank deregulation. For corporations, this agenda has worked fantastically: American multinational corporations are making record profits, paying record bonuses and sitting on piles of cash—freezing or downsizing the American workforce while pressing for further tax breaks and deregulation.

That's why the AFL-CIO and the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council (SDICLC) worked with numerous community allies to tell TPP trade negotiators, "Enough is enough!" Fair trade, not free trade, is what working families need. SDICLC Secretary-Treasurer Lorena Gonzalez, U.S. Representative Bob Filner, and more than a dozen other speakers told the negotiators and the press what working families need is not "free trade," but "fair trade" that promotes good job creation, respects labor and human rights, preserves the sovereign right of nations to make public interest policy and doesn't weaken our ability to Buy American. A key theme of the rally was "Bring Jobs Home."

Members of Laborers, Communications Workers of America, Theatrical Stage Employees, Machinists, Electrical Workers, UNITEHERE!, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Painters and Allied Trades, Office and Professional Employees and many other locals attended the rally, as well as grassroots activists working on food sovereignty, global economic development and indigenous rights issues. Some of the negotiators even wandered out from the air conditioned negotiating rooms to see what all the fuss was about—I hope they got an earful.

FULL story at link.