(naked capitalism)
The U.S. Trade Representative’s Office has been maligned for its network of Trade Advisory Committees, allegedly “independent” counsel for trade agreements. The Washington Post did the best work on the Advisory Committees back in February of last year, showing that 85 percent of the cleared advisors (meaning cleared to read the text of trade agreements as they are being negotiated) either worked directly for private industries or their trade groups.
But there’s another, more obscure group called the Labor Advisory Committee. Its 19 members are all the heads of major labor unions (Clayola Brown, president of the A. Phillip Randolph Institute, I guess technically isn’t, but that organization is a constituency group of the AFL-CIO). And like all Advisory Committees, they are required by law to write a report to Congress expressing their opinions about any finalized trade agreement. That means we now have this 121-page document, giving labor’s full argument against the TPP, from the people who have been following it from the inside for several years.
This was an argument that labor’s cleared advisors have been prevented from making. Because of the secretive nature of trade talks, those opposed to the deal fight with one hand tied behind their backs, unable to speak about what they knew about the agreement. And they are at the mercy of USTR’s deliberate, dissent-crushing rules.
According to the report, USTR and the Department of Labor “refused to share the specific text of proposed changes to the labor chapter” for over three years, until the text was substantially complete in August 2015. The Committee was never consulted on side agreements with Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei, which deal entirely with those countries’ labor laws. The Committee believes this actually violated the law, but who would enforce it?
link: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/labor-advisory-committee-report-on-tpp-synthesizing-everything-wrong-about-the-trade-deal.html
= new reply since forum marked as read