2009 Year in Review: Trade Policy

Trade Agreements and Worker Rights

While the Administration is officially still reviewing its trade policy, signs during 2009 were not encouraging.  The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) took a mild approach to its initial handling of the first (and only) worker rights complaint submitted under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, filed against Guatemala in 2008 and passed from the outgoing Bush Administration to the Obama Administration in January 2009.  And while the Administration decided not to bring forward the pending Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 2009 to avoid a divisive fight with Democrats opposed to expansion of the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) model, it has suggested that this and other pending agreements should be considered (and approved) as old business left-over from the Bush Administration, an unacceptable position.  The Administration also backed away from any significant effort to address NAFTA’s ineffective labor and environmental protections.

USLEAP provided reports, talking points, and analysis used by opponents of the Colombia FTA, meeting with USTR and other governmental officials on Colombia as well as Guatemala, reporting on and exposing the weaknesses of the labor protections in CAFTA and NAFTA, and generating grassroots and US union support for congressional letters to Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom and Secretary of State Clinton (on Colombia).

The USLEAP-authored Justice for All: The Struggle for Worker Rights in Guate- mala was released by the AFL-CIO in sum- mer 2009, providing background support for the CAFTA complaint.  USLEAP also began preparations for testing the effectiveness of the worker rights conditions of the Peru Free Trade Agreement that went into force in February 2009.

Labor Law Reform                                                                             

In Ecuador, hopes for significant labor law reform were offset by governmental decrees sharply limiting the rights of public sector workers, an issue which USLEAP raised with USTR at the request of the Ecuadorian union movement. In Mexico,USLEAP participated in deliberations about a campaign targeting the protection contract system under which most Mexican workers are effectively denied the right to indepen- dent unions.

In Colombia, USLEAP began focusing on the use of subcontracting to deny workers’ rights and benefits, a practice that is spreading globally. In an important victory against subcontracting, the region’s largest private sector union, Sintrainagro, with a 13-day strike in May successfully resisted its introduction in the banana growing region of northern Colombia.

Honduras Coup and CAFTA

The coup in Honduras exposed another fundamental flaw with CAFTA, revealing that CAFTA has no provision for applying trade sanctions in the face of the overthrow of a democratically-elected president.  USLEAP organized a US trade union letter in support of a resolution condemning the coup and supported an initiative that persuaded four apparel firms to take a public stand essentially opposing the coup.