Can’t Do It Without Congress : White House needs to listen to Gephardt

House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt is reminding President Bush that he promised to protect American workers and the environment in negotiating a free-trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. The Missouri Democrat, one of his party’s leading spokesmen on trade, fears U.S. negotiators are paying “scant attention” to the sensitive issues of “trans-border” pollution and worker retraining.

With negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement possibly nearing a conclusion, the Administration should be mindful that successful enactment depends on a cooperative Congress. That means Democrats like Gephardt and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.), who also warns that a free-trade agreement is unlikely to pass unless it includes a firm commitment on worker retraining, on protection of the environment and on border infrastructure.

President Bush promised to take specific steps to protect American workers and the environment in May, 1991, as a concession to get Gephardt and Bentsen’s support for authorization to move the trade negotiations along a diplomatic fast track. That procedure allows the President to negotiate a trade agreement that Congress can then either adopt or reject but cannot amend.

Gephardt, who has been briefed frequently by the Administration on the status of the trade talks, said the agreement as now designed does not provide for retraining of U.S. workers who may lose their jobs or for any mechanism to pay for the cleanup of Mexican pollution. U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills insists otherwise, but the negotiations have been private, so it is hard to verify her assurances. As a guarantee that these crucial issues won’t be ignored, Gephardt has proposed a transaction tax on goods moving across the U.S.-Mexico border; the funds would go toward job retraining and environmental cleanup. The amount of such a tax is yet to be determined. So long as the tax is not so high that it becomes, in effect, a trade barrier, Gephardt’s proposal is certainly not unreasonable.

Gephardt and Bentsen are forcing the Administration to face up to the less than rosy political realities of the trade pact. There will be some short-term pain with the long-term gains of a free-trade agreement that would create a North American market of 360 million consumers. The Institute for International Economics, for example, estimates that the agreement would eventually create 325,000 jobs but projects that 150,000 existing jobs would be lost over the first five years of the pact.

Cushioning the blow of such dislocations and anticipating new needs are crucial to the success of a trade agreement.