We Can Do Better Than This Trade Deal

Go to any shopping mall and you’ll see teenagers, parents in tow, crowding into shoe stores. For kids, the object is to buy the trendiest shoes they can. For parents, it’s to get out with their bank accounts intact. It gets tougher every year--a pair of Nike sneakers can retail for $135.

With the cost of Nikes so high, most folks might think the shoes are expensive to make. But there are 110,000 people who’d tell you otherwise; they’re the workers making Nikes in China today.

Many of them are young women. Contractors believe workers over the age of 25 might be too easily exhausted by the work. Who wouldn’t be after working a 12-hour shift, six days a week?

Yet if their working conditions are bad, their pay is worse: 20 cents to 26 cents an hour. In a country where it costs a mother $12 a month to buy milk for her baby, wages like that don’t go very far.

Faced with these kinds of conditions, even anti-labor conservatives might see the need for unions. So do China’s workers, but organizing isn’t much of an option in a country where union activists routinely face harassment, arrest, imprisonment and even torture. In fact, after helping to organize a union federation in Hunan, one activist, Zhang Jingsheng, was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

To put it in perspective, if the U.S. took China’s approach to workers’ rights, the recent, hard-won victory by striking Los Angeles janitors would have been impossible. Every striker would have been fired, the journalists who reported it penalized, the community leaders who supported it ostracized and, of course, the leaders of the Service Employees International Union and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor would now be in prison.

Given China’s hostility to unions, it’s no surprise that corporations like Nike see it as a huge maquiladora (export plant) where they’re able to put profits first and the needs of workers last.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with companies like Nike making money, but they shouldn’t be making policy. That, however, is exactly what they’re attempting to do in urging passage of a permanent trade deal with China.

There is something about the word “permanent” that should bring pause, if not outright alarm. By agreeing to the China trade deal, Congress would forever lose its ability to review China’s trade status on an annual basis. That review process provides us with the only leverage we have to effectively challenge China’s abysmal record on human rights.

Given their inability to defend China’s record on human rights, it’s no surprise that advocates of the trade deal have presented this as a dispute between the supporters of trade and its opponents. Nonsense. The opponents of a permanent deal with China value trade, but we refuse to trade in our values. Instead, we believe the United States can do better than the trade deal we’re being asked to approve.

If we can negotiate trade agreements to protect intellectual property rights, why not agreements that expand intellectual freedom? If we can negotiate treaties that protect the rights of corporations, why not bargain for treaties that safeguard the rights of workers? If we can bargain with China to lift tariffs, why not bargain to free tens of thousands of imprisoned religious leaders, trade unionists and human rights activists?

The China trade deal may fit some big corporations like an old shoe, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. should wear it.