A Seat At The Table, Please!

If we opponents to the TPP trade agreement seem to be making an all or nothing argument it is because that is how globalization and trade agreements were sold to us. Think back a minute: remember all the Friedmanesque assurances that free trade would not hurt us, that we could give up our manufacturing and become the nation of inventors. I did not have a blog back then, but I was telling anyone who would listen that this was a horribly destructive fairy tale and that if globalization became an all or nothing proposition we would be left with nothing!

With all due respect to President Obama, Elizabeth Warren is right. All of the major corporations that would be effected by trade agreements are invited to the table to discuss the terms of those agreements, but labor has no chair at that table! Why? Why is labor not consulted? The large labor unions hire some of the best economists in the world. Unions know that the more prosperous the nation is the more prosperous their members will be, assuming their members are allowed to collectively bargain for a fair share of the wealth. It does not take a genius to figure out that our workers cannot compete with a guy who makes less than a dollar an hour, and that our businesses salivate over the prospect of hiring people who will work for starvation wages. Given the number of jobs we have already lost to bad trade agreements the secrecy about the terms of TPP and the exclusion of labor union participation in the process seem particularly egregious.

I have to say that the proponents of TPP are also presenting an all or nothing argument because they are making it sound like there can be no trade without the agreement. The truth is that a high volume of trade takes place every day without such agreements and that such agreements are only desirable when they offer us some advantage or protect us from unfair trade practices. Go to the principles for trade agreements set forth by the Progressive Caucus. We should use whatever tools we have to negotiate agreements that conform to those principles, and the terms of the agreements should be disclosed and debated before the agreements are ratified.