Another Free Trade disaster as death and distruction continue unabated.
The latest email from Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.
"In the three years since the Labor Action Plan was unveiled, 73 Colombian unionists have been murdered, and there have been 31 murder attempts and 953 death threats against unionists."
May 15, 2014
Friend,
Today is the two-year anniversary of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA).
And we are sorry to report that labor rights conditions in Colombia are deteriorating, which is dire because already more unionists were being assassinated in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined.
This is a truly shameful situation.
Before the Colombia FTA was passed, unions in Colombia and the U.S. and members of both countries’ legislatures said the FTA would make a bad situation worse. The Obama administration said it had a plan to make everything okay.
Write your representative and tell him or her not to replicate the mistakes of the Colombia FTA in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
To assuage congressional concerns about the rampant unionist assassinations and death threats in Colombia, and the total disregard for basic labor rights there, the administration signed a Labor Action Plan.
This plan was ostensibly designed to ensure improvements in Colombia’s worker protections and end the decades of impunity for violence against workers. This was in addition to the FTA’s Labor Chapter, which the administration touted as greatly improved relative to the labor rules in NAFTA.
Now we can evaluate the results.
In the three years since the Labor Action Plan was unveiled, 73 Colombian unionists have been murdered, and there have been 31 murder attempts and 953 death threats against unionists. These crimes have not resulted in any captures, trials or convictions. The overall impunity rate for the more than 3,000 unionist murders occurring from 1977 through the present is 87 percent, while impunity for anti-union death threats stands at 99.9 percent.
Meanwhile, forced labor, child labor and horrific conditions in sugar and palm oil plantations continue. Basic rights to organize are denied routinely. And now, with the FTA in place, the pressure is off the Colombian government and business elite to make improvements: They have preferential access into the U.S. market no matter what happens to workers there.
And the worst part is, the U.S. is about to make the same mistake again.
Urge your representative to learn from the shameful record of the Colombia FTA and not repeat it by Fast-Tracking a TPP with labor rights violator Vietnam.
For four years, the U.S. has been negotiating the TPP — a proposed trade agreement with 11 other counties with varying levels of respect for workers’ rights. One of them is Vietnam, a country that bans independent unions and was recently red-listed by the Department of Labor as one of just four countries that use both child labor and forced labor in apparel production.
Vietnam was actually down-listed to the worst labor rights violator category during TPP negotiations. Yet it still is participating in the negotiations. And the administration is planning on repeating the same approach that failed with Colombia.
As if that weren’t enough, the administration is also asking for Fast Track — an extraordinary authority that would let the president sign the TPP before Congress votes on it and then railroad it through Congress with limited debate and no amendments.
Send an email to your member of Congress asking him or her to say “no” to Fast Track, the TPP and Vietnam’s terrible labor conditions.
We need to learn the lesson of the Colombia FTA: no more “trade” agreements that protect only property rights, not human rights. Lives depend on it.
Thank you for all that you do.
In solidarity,
Melanie Foley
Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
