Labor Leaders Protest, Quit Trade Commission
White House efforts to grant China permanent access to the U.S. market suffered a new complication Thursday when AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and two other labor leaders resigned in protest from a federal advisory commission.
Labor’s defection, coupled with a failure Thursday by China and the European Union to reach agreement in Beijing on a trade deal, further clouds China’s prospects for entry to the World Trade Organization.
Sweeney said his resignation was triggered by a Jan. 25 letter from the trade advisory commission’s chairman, Procter & Gamble executive committee chairman John Pepper. In it, Pepper said that the only issue before the group this year would be the China deal and that Pepper expected that a majority of commission members would support the White House on the vote.
That decision “appears designed to isolate the noncorporate representatives” on the commission and “raises a serious question as to whether there is a genuine acceptance of the premise that workers’ interests should be considered in the formulation of U.S. trade policy,” Sweeney wrote in a letter of resignation to Pepper.
The White House wants Congress to grant China permanent access to U.S. markets and scrap the current system of annual votes on the issue. The AFL-CIO opposes that, fearing export of jobs to China and saying that Congress needs to keep up pressure on China on such things as human rights and weapons exports.
Last fall, Sweeney angered some of his unions by signing a joint letter to the president from the corporate-dominated President’s Advisory Commission on Trade Policy and Negotiations. The letter endorsed the overall U.S. negotiating position at a meeting of the WTO in Seattle.
His labor critics contend that the WTO essentially oversees the export of U.S. jobs. But Sweeney pointed to White House pledges to push for adding labor standards to the WTO’s rules of international trade.
The Seattle meeting ended in deadlock amid raucous street protests, and the labor proposal has gone nowhere.
U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky wrote to Sweeney on Thursday urging him to reconsider his decision. A spokesman for Pepper declined to comment.
