TRADE: Clinton Can’t Get Fast Track-tion

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 27 1997 (IPS) - President Bill Clinton, struggling to win Congressional approval for “fast track” authority to negotiate free-trade agreements with Chile and other countries, is finding the going is getting tough.

Few observers now believe Clinton and his business supporters can be successful. The adminstration’s late start, combined with attacks on his fast-track package from both left and right and possible new procedural obstacles, have given its foes unexpected momentum.

“Fast track can be defeated,” declared John Sweeney, president of the giant AFL-CIO labour confederation earlier this week. His statement contrasted shrply with his statement just one week ago that labour stood ready to compromise on the package.

On Wednesday, Clinton took his campaign into the lion’s den, the annual AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh. While he was applauded repeatedly for his efforts to defend workers over the last five years, silence greeted the presidential pitch on fast- track.

“I know we don’t see eye to eye on fast track,” Clinton said, “but we share too many values and priorities to let this disagreement damage our partnership.”

Some labour leaders, however, have warned Democratic lawmakers that a vote for fast track may lose them financial support, as well as many hundreds of votes, when they face reelection next year.

The President needs fast-track authority to negotiate trade accords without worrying that they can be amended by special interests when they are submitted to Congress for ratification. Under fast-track rules, trade agreements are subject only to a yes- or-no vote by both houses within 60 days of their formal submission.

Congress routinely has granted fast-track authority but has failed to give it to Clinton since 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect. Clinton has been caught between the demands of most CongressionalDemocrats that new trade agreements include enforceable provisions – namely, sanctions – to ensure protection of worker rights and the environment, and most Republicans who contend that labour rights and environmental conditions have no place in trade treaties.

After a six-month delay, Clinton last week unveiled a proposal which tried to finesse the core conflict by proposing that environmental and labour protection be included in trade pacts only if they were “directly related to trade.”

Most observers believe this language would permit U.S. trade negotiators to discuss foreign labour and environmental regulations only in the context of lowering them if they interfere with trade. “The possibility of preserving or increasing workers’ and environmental rights would be excluded from specific trade agreements,” says Jeff Faux, head of the pro-labour Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington.

To soften the blow, Clinton vowed to pursue labour and environmental “side agreements” similar to those negotiated with Canada and Mexico in NAFTA, and to push for the adoption of more general worker and environmental protections in multilateral forums, especially the World Trde Organisation (WTO) in Geneva. But left-wing critics scorned these commitments.

‘The WTO has already made a firm decision not to link trade with labour or environmental issues,” according to Pharis Harvey, director of the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF). At the same time, the NAFTA side agreements are largely seen as toothless.

Without enforceable provisions protecting labour rights and environmental standards, new trade agreements with Chile and other Latin American and Pacific nations are likely to spur a “race to the bottom,” as U.S. capital and corporations flee to low-wage countries with weak regulatory systems, crticis say. Moreover, they insist that Clinton’s proposal uses an unfair double standard towards capital investment and intellectual property rights, which are protected by sanctions, and labour rights and the environment, which are not.

“That is why (the) critics have demanded that future trade agreements elevate worker rights to the same plane of importance as the protection of corporate property rights,” noted Jerome Levinson, a law professor and former general counsel of the Inter- American Development Bank, in a recent letter to the New York Times.

While the administration anticipated that its proposal would probaby not go down well with labour and the left, it appeared genuinely surprised when prominent Republicans also rejected it.

In Senate hearings last week, Texas Republican Phil Gramm blasted the bill’s reference to labour rights and the environment as “totally and absolutely unacceptable,” and Majority Leader Trent Lott told reporters that the bill would have to be substantially revised.

Gramm argued that including labour and environmental issues in new trade agreements under fast-track rules would bypass normal procedures in considering legislation on these questions. “Fast track, with its limits on amendments, could be used to change domestic law,” including laws in most southern states that make it easier for companies to resist unionisation of their workforces, he warned.

Despite assurances from administration officials that this was not intended, Gramm’s outspoken opposition resulted in a “free- for-all” over fast-track legislation.

Democrats critical of Clinton’s plan have already begun drafting their own proposal to incorporate tough labour and environmental conditions into the legislation, while Gramm and other Republicans reportedly were working on an update of the fast- track authority granted in 1988. As many as four different propsals may soon come into play, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The problm faced by the White House and other fast-track supporters is that there is very little time to put together a bill that is certain to command a majority of votes in both houses.

The Republican-dominated Congress hopes to adjourn by mid- October, and most pundits think it unlikely that fast-track will be taken up in 1998, an election year. Worse, Republicans leaders are now insisting that Congress take up two important domestic matters, which Clinton has vowed to veto, before acting on fast track.

Congressional aides believe a winning bill will have to get the backing of roughly 70 percent of Congressional Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats in order to pass the House of Representatives.

Vote-counters say they see only about 20 percent of Democrats supporting fast-track at this point, while a key fast-track backer said that he was “very concerned” that southern Republican lawmakers from agricultural districts who have been disappointed by NAFTA may oppose fast-track.