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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 20, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Clinton's fast track is derailed

By Lal Roohk

Organized labor won a landmark victory Nov. 10 when President Bill Clinton called off the "fast-track" vote in Congress. The AFL-CIO and its allies in the environmental movement put enough pressure on Congress to keep Clinton from getting fast-track authority on trade legislation.

Clinton was forced to put off the vote in Congress until next year, when his chances may not be better. He made the final-hour decision because he couldn’t buy or steal enough votes in the House of Representatives to pass his proposal.

Corporate trade agreements are a key part of Clinton’s program. Getting a fast-track bill passed would have made it possible to quietly slip international trade treaties like NAFTA through Congress with only a "yes" or "no" vote and no debate.

Corporate America really writes the provisions of the secret trade treaties. The agreements are based on the competitive drive to corner the world’s markets. To stay ahead in the competition they must continually seize more of the wealth produced by working people.

The unions don’t have the kind of money big business has to buy influence in Congress; the strength of labor unions is in their membership. And big business tries to keep unions from having any say in the trade treaties.

Clinton slid NAFTA past the unions

When NAFTA was slid under the table on a fast track in 1993, the AFL-CIO didn’t even get to see the language before Clinton made it law. What fast track would do is keep working people from ever having any say over trade legislation.

The AFL-CIO under the new leadership of President John Sweeney launched a massive campaign against Clinton’s fast track. Unions across the country began an educational process to let workers know that the propaganda about NAFTA’s promise of jobs, higher labor standards, and wages in Mexico, Canada and the U.S. was all lies.

The unions held rallies, speakouts and press conferences. They made Congress aware that this is a new ball game.

Since the 1970s, real wages in the U.S. have sunk. NAFTA has accelerated this loss. The business sector that would gain by extending NAFTA to include Chile and other Latin American nations tried to disguise this. Clinton even went to the AFL-CIO convention in September and harangued the delegates with his unpopular trade policies.

An important study was published by the Economic Policy Institute titled "NAFTA’s casualties, employment effects on men, women and minorities" on Sept. 19. It reported that NAFTA had resulted in the loss of 394,835 jobs in its first three years.

A disproportionate number of the jobs eliminated by NAFTA were manufacturing jobs, which pay higher wages. New jobs created by NAFTA are mostly in the service industries where the average pay is only 77 percent of manufacturing’s average. This contributed to NAFTA’s effect on lowering wages and income.

Workers without college educations often find their best opportunities in manufacturing. They have been the hardest hit. They make up half of the U.S. labor force, but are 60 percent of those who have lost their jobs due to NAFTA.

NAFTA has had a terrible impact on workers’ ability to organize a union. The number of firms that move rather than bargain with the workers has tripled since NAFTA began, according to the EPI report. Bosses are able to get wage and benefit concessions from workers by simply threatening to shut down and move production abroad.

Trade unions around the world are fighting NAFTA-type trade agreements. They say that the U.S.-dominated World Trade Organization and GATT are set up to restructure their economies and break the strength of organized labor. The defeat of Clinton’s fast track by the AFL-CIO is a development that will be widely welcomed.

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