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Volume 14, Issue 81
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Monday, April 23, 2007
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Rangel Upset by NAM Letter Opposing Democrats’ Labor Proposal
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., lashed out last week at a prominent business group for jeopardizing negotiations between Congress and the Bush administration on trade. In an April 19 written statement, Rangel said that a letter sent to him by National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler was “a gross distortion of the facts that does a disservice to the continuing effort to reach a bipartisan consensus on the future of trade policy.”
As part of a far-reaching proposal on trade policy offered in late March, Democrats are seeking to require trade agreement partner countries to adopt and enforce basic international labor standards in their domestic laws and practices. One way that has been proposed to do this is to include core International Labor Organization standards in the text of free trade agreements. But opponents say that could open U.S. labor laws to challenge by FTA partners, and Engler’s letter stated that NAM would not support any agreement that had such an effect. He pointed to federal and state labor laws that contain provisions contrary to ILO requirements, such as Michigan’s prohibition of strikes by public employees, as instances where challenges could arise. “We believe that our nation’s labor laws must not be put at risk as efforts are made to improve our trade opportunities,” Engler wrote.
Rangel responded by asserting that many of the statements in Engler’s letter are inaccurate. Specifically, he said, the Democrats’ proposal would obligate countries to adhere to the five core labor standards outlined in the 1998 ILO Declaration, not the ILO conventions on labor standards as Engler’s letter states. “We are not seeking to raise the bar and incorporate the ILO conventions, but the Declaration we have already signed,” he wrote. Rangel pointed out that every FTA the U.S. has concluded since 1998 has restated the United States’ commitment to the 1998 Declaration. In addition, Rangel noted, the Democrats’ proposal provides that only governments would be able to challenge compliance with an FTA and that labor issues would be subject to challenge only in the specific case where there is an impact on trade between FTA partners.
Source Document 1...
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