Trade’s Image Takes Beating Among Public

America, to put it flatly, has embarked on a trade war with the most improbable of enemies: itself.

With little fanfare, the once noncontroversial notion of “trade” has become a battle cry in key Washington circles, a term bristling with dark associations about personal insecurity in an amoral global economy. From consumer activists to mainstream Republicans to family farmers, a diverse army now challenges proposals that once would have passed without protest.

As a result, priority items on the White House trade agenda have been shoved into the background, shelved or otherwise shrouded in uncertainty. To cite a few: expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement, allowing China into the World Trade Organization, easing trade barriers with Africa and the Caribbean and increasing the president’s authority to negotiate trade deals.

“The American public no longer believes that trade is good for most Americans,” said Ann Hoffman, legislative director for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. “And that is quite a watershed.”

Ironically, trade fears are flourishing at a time when more Americans--133 million--are employed than ever, incomes are rising and the economic boom marches on without letup.

The rosy statistics, however, offer no solace to American workers in those industries, such as apparel and steel, that are being hammered by overseas competition.

And beyond that, the critics have gained a potent weapon in the trade deficit, which has become a monthly reminder that the United States is being bombarded with goods made by foreign workers, not Americans. The trade gap hit yet another U.S. record in March and is on pace to reach an all-time high of more than $200 billion this year.

Trade enthusiasts fondly point to varied benefits of global commerce, such as lower prices and greater choice for consumers, new opportunities for exporters and a presumed improvement in relations among trading partners. But when foreign competition closes the doors of a U.S. factory, the job losses are concentrated and explosive, overshadowing the diffuse and undramatic benefits of trade.

“You don’t have communities rise up and say, ‘Thank you for these sales of widgets to Malaysia,’ ” U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky said in an interview. By contrast, she added, “if a [factory] gate is closed and it says ‘Moved to Mexico,’ that community is immediately impacted.”

While Americans have always harbored suspicions about foreign entanglements in general, and organized labor has looked askance at imports in particular, the breadth of today’s backlash against the trade agenda is something new.

Mainstream Republicans, a traditional bulwark of support for trade deals, have become increasingly skeptical and are considering whether to impose quotas on steel imports--a measure that has already passed the House.

Conservatives and liberals have been offended by WTO rule-makers, who have demanded changes in U.S. laws regarded by other countries as trade barriers in disguise. Venezuela and Brazil have challenged gasoline standards, and India has protested regulations on shrimp-fishing nets.

Organized labor, meanwhile, has been joined by a swarm of consumer activists, environmentalists and human rights proponents in demanding that new trade deals cushion the impact on U.S. workers and even set standards for working conditions overseas. Entire industries, including paper, have complained that foreign countries have easier access to the U.S. market than they grant Americans in their own.

On top of all that, trade is now caught up in a different sort of politics: Personal distrust of President Clinton has made some in Congress unwilling to grant him the expanded authority to approve trade accords that Congress cannot amend, authority that previous presidents had enjoyed since the 1970s. Support for giving the president so-called fast-track trade authority has been eroding. It was only 10 votes behind in the House in late 1997, according to one informal tally; but when it came up for a vote in October 1998, it lost by 63.

“I’ll never give fast track to this administration ever again,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), one of the many in Congress who turned against the proposal after initially supporting it.

The implications of this backlash are significant, according to trade experts. Foreign countries have become less likely to see the United States as a leader in global trade policy, and key initiatives, such as a proposed international treaty on investment, have been derailed. In this climate, Chile has pushed back hopes of joining NAFTA in the short term, and countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Colombia have placed a growing priority on trade talks with Europe rather than the United States.

Still, U.S. trade negotiators have kept busy, and can claim quiet progress on information technology, telecommunications and other global issues. But the White House has become much more wary of exposing the big trade issues to votes in Congress, where the administration risks embarrassing defeat.

“You see fewer and fewer issues on the agenda because the administration realizes it can’t win the battles,” says Greg Mastel, a trade specialist with the Economic Strategy Institute think tank in Washington.

Oddly, two White House victories on trade may have set the stage for today’s impasse. More than anything, congressional approval of NAFTA in 1993--a dramatic triumph for Clinton--galvanized the emerging coalition of critics. The White House also was able to prevail in 1994, when Congress approved the Geneva-based World Trade Organization to serve as referee in a vastly overhauled system of global trade rules.

Stung by the losses, labor unions and other skeptics of trade policy dug in for a long-term campaign to alter the agenda. Even if they had little in common, they swapped political intelligence, established Internet sites and orchestrated news leaks to block proposals.

The effect proved devastating. Consider the fate of something called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a proposed treaty that could have given foreign investors controversial new protections against national regulations, along with unprecedented rights to sue governments in closed-door proceedings.

Lori Wallach, a trade analyst working for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, dubbed the measure “NAFTA on steroids,” a term quickly seized upon by critics of various political persuasions. In late 1997, Wallach slipped a copy of a draft version to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who was deeply suspicious of the trend toward global rule-making in trade.

As legend has it, a chagrined Helms asked in a closed session of his panel: “What’s this 180 pages of ‘NAFTA on steroids’ that some tree hugger’s giving me?”

The proposal has been little heard from since.

Although poll results vary, there is evidence that the American public’s attitude toward trade has grown more dubious in the last few years.

As recently as March 1994, a survey by the Times Mirror Center on People and the Press found that just over half the public believed that treaties such as NAFTA would create U.S. jobs, with 32% fearing job loss. But by December 1998, the attitudes had flip-flopped. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 58% of Americans believed that trade had reduced U.S. jobs and wages, with cheap imports being the main villain.

“People are feeling a loss of control in their daily lives, and it has a great deal to do with economic globalization in all of its dimensions,” said Daniel A. Seligman, program director for responsible trade for the Sierra Club in Washington.

It is not at all clear, however, how well the feelings square with certain economic realities.

Despite the concerns, most workers do not suffer the layoffs or shutdowns that are the great fears of globalization. Trade apparently was one of the factors weighing down wages in the period from about 1979 to 1995, many economists believe. But most of them see it as a minor factor compared with, say, advances in technology. Similarly, trade is responsible for painful layoffs in certain industries, such as apparel and steel, but this is occurring at a time when layoffs overall are at exceptionally low levels.

“Trade does have some of those [negative] effects--but it’s not as huge as some people would have you believe,” said Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a labor economist at UCLA. “It’s not the whole story, by any means.”

As a political matter, however, the negative part of the story resonates loudly with the public and with their elected officials.

Apparel and textiles, for example, have shed 375,000 jobs since early 1993, according to the Labor Department. There is broad agreement that many of these jobs migrated to such low-cost environs as China, Mexico and the Caribbean. The U.S. steel industry, which has decried a surge in imports from battered economies overseas, lost 12,000 jobs last year.

In an attempt to promote the pro-trade case, Commerce Secretary Bill Daley recently launched a “National Trade Education Tour” to provide some rare, positive public relations for the cause.

But as Daley and some business executives made stops in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, they were greeted by sign-wielding representatives of Clean Water Action, Alliance to Save Democracy, Green Party, Public Citizen Global Trade Watch, and labor unions. Protesters even shadowed Daley in a bus that derided the “Free trade fat cats.”

Later, in an interview, the affable Commerce secretary said he had “no problem” with the demonstrators.

“We’ve got to let the American people understand the benefits of trade. At the same time, those of us who are believers have to acknowledge . . . there are legitimate fears about trade.”