Through endnotes to the book I have tried to provide simple updates with respect to persons and events since George Becker’s death. However I did not seek to provide updates on major issues Becker had been working on during his Presidency. The website provides me an opportunity to describe developments on a few of them. The first and perhaps most important I will start with is international trade and the push to have labor and environmental rights included in the core provisions of trade agreements.
Free Trade Agreements
The Bush administration negotiated and secured Congressional passage of a series of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) between 2003 and 2008.
| Singapore | 05/06/03 |
| Chile | 01/01/04 |
| Australia | 05/18/04 |
| CAFTA-DomRep | 08/05/04 |
| Moroco | 01/01/06 |
| Bahrain | 01/11/06 |
|
Oman |
01/19/06 |
For Becker and the labor movement a key goal was to obtain enforceable labor and environmental accords in the core provisions of trade agreements so that workers in both countries would be protected. Until his death in early 2007, in his position on the Trade and Environmental Policy Advisory Committee to the International Trade Representative Becker objected to all of these agreements because he viewed the language to be a step back from the very modest language in the Jordan FTA (page 319 of the book).
Becker died on Feb. 3, 2007. That May the US Trade Representative’s website announced a Bipartisan Agreement on Trade Policy. Subsequent Free Trade Agreements would contain the following commitments with respect to labor rights in the core provisions of the agreements:
Internationally-recognized labor principles incorporated into trade agreements
- Enforceable reciprocal obligation for the countries to adopt and maintain in their laws and practice the five basic internationally-recognized labor principles, as stated in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.
Freedom of association;
The effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;
The elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor;
Effective abolition of child labor and a prohibition on the worst forms of child labor; and
The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.
- Enforceable obligation to effectively enforce labor laws; five basic internationally-recognized labor principles from the 1998 Declaration, plus acceptable conditions of work.
- Violation requires showing that non-enforcement of labor obligations occurred through a sustained or recurring course of action or inaction [Emphasis mine]
- A violation must occur in a manner affecting trade or investment between the parties.[Emphasis mine]
Language containing these principles was then incorporated into the US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement which went into effect in early 2009. The above-underlined language would prove problematic.
In campaigning in 2016 Donald Trump argued that NAFTA was a disaster. When he took office, he asked his Trade Representative, Robert Leighthizer to renegotiate it. The document that resulted was called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). It followed the May 2007 pattern. It was clearly an improvement over NAFTA, but, given the widespread existence of government-protected paper unions in Mexico, it was not nearly enough and other provisions did not go far enough from labor’s point of view. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that it would not be presented for a vote until the deficiencies had been fixed.
A negotiating process then ensued. Representatives of Nancy Pelosi met with Robert Leighthizer who in turn met with representatives of the two counties. As Chief Trade Counsel for the House Ways and Means Committee, Katherine Tai was deeply involved. Substantial revisions to the draft USMCA were reached. Mexico agreed to changes in its labor law which would facilitate its compliance with its obligations. Perhaps the most dramatic improvement in the agreement was the establishment of a Rapid Response Labor Mechanism that allows the U.S. to take enforcement action against individual factories if they violate the labor rights provisions. Rich Trumka and the labor movement had fought hard to achieve a truly meaningful agreement. It announced its support and the revised USMCA was approved by Congress and went into effect on July 1, 2020.
Finally! A trade agreement that included the truly enforceable labor and environmental accords that Gephardt and Becker had first talked about in their meeting in 1993 (p. 102 of book) and that Becker had pushed for from then until his death in 2007. Of course, even if it is enforceable, people have to enforce it. The new few years will tell how successful that effort is.
Trade with China
In hindsight, three things seem clear about the deal President Clinton made with China and the related passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China which was approved by Congress with a majority of Republicans voting for it and a majority of Democrats voting against it. (The fight to pass PNTR for China is discussed at length in Chapter X of the book.)
First, it resulted in a sharp loss in good paying, manufacturing jobs in the United States in the two decades that followed. Second, that loss led to the disillusion and embitterment of large numbers of blue collar workers and was one of the reasons for the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Trump’s 2016 campaign against “bad trade deals” and his institution of tariffs after he was elected did not lead to the sky falling, as so many economists had suggested. What it did was quiet the globalists in both parties and make rhetorical “protectionists” out of many elected Republicans. One good result of the seeming change in attitude involved Catherine Tai. Tai had been instrumental in the inclusion of effective labor and environmental provisions in the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and was critical of the China deal. She was approved unanimously by the Senate when she was nominated International Trade Representative by President Biden, something unthinkable a decade earlier. In her new position, Tai has been a strong advocate for the inclusion of worker interests in the negotiation of trade agreements.
Becker and the other Democratic members of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission were unsuccessful in gaining support from the Republican members during his time on the Commission in the first decade of the 21st century. (See p. 312-313 of book) But the atmosphere has now changed. The 2022 Report of the Commission recommends among other items that:
Congress direct the Administration to produce within 90 days
an interagency report coordinated by the Office of the U.S.
Trade Representative to assess China’s compliance with the
terms and conditions of the 1999 Agreement on Market Access
between the People’s Republic of China and the United States
of America. The assessment should be presented as a summa-
ry list of comply/noncomply status of the provisions under the
agreement. If the report concludes that China has failed to com-
ply with the provisions agreed to for its accession to the WTO,
Congress should consider legislation to immediately suspend
China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) treatment.
Following the suspension of PNTR, Congress should assess new
conditions for renewal of normal trade relations with China.
(Commission Report, www.uscc.gov p. 727-728)
(Mike Wessel worked closely with Becker on the China Commission until Becker’s death in early 2007. He continues to serve on the Commission till the present. One of the other Democratic appointees serving on the Commission for the 2022 report is Kim Glass. Glass had previously served as Executive Director of the Blue Green Alliance following Dave Foster’s departure from that position to serve as senior advisor to then Energy Secretary Dr. Ernest Moniz.)
Lori Wallach and Mike Wessel Discuss China Trade policy
Lori Wallach, a long-time expert on trade in her own right, has interviewed Mike Wessel, about the China Commission’s recommendation on our trade policy toward China. (Both were key advisers to George Becker in the 1990s as those of you who have read the book know.) The result of the interview is a podcast which has just been released. It is an excellent analysis of our trade relationship with China during the last two decades. You can find it by searching the web for “Rethinking Trade with Lori Wallach”.