Public Employee Press

No freedom in Colombia Free Trade Act

By MATTHEW CUNNINGHAM-COOK

The corporate-funded "free-trade" lobby is licking its chops for the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which would help businesses ship U.S. jobs overseas.

As the U.S. labor movement fights back against the FTA, the AFL-CIO has launched an ad campaign showing that the deal is bad for workers in the United States and in Colombia. The FTA would give business another source of cheaper labor and give huge U.S. agro-corporations new markets for their taxpayer-subsidized food.

The U.S. labor movement is fighting the agreement, because when U.S. workers compete with underpaid workers in other countries, the U.S. workers usually lose their jobs. The FTA would hurt the economic recovery and the struggling middle class and it would let the Colombian government off the hook for the blood of thousands of trade unionists on its hands.

So-called free trade has had a disastrous effect on working people and unions in the United States. The 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, the model for the Colombia FTA, destroyed about 700,000 U.S. jobs. NAFTA eliminated taxes on goods from Mexico and made it considerably easier for corporations to move factories and services to places where labor and environmental standards are virtually nonexistent.

NAFTA forced the Mexican congress to repeal the country's 80-year-old land reform laws. As a result, millions of Mexicans lost their small farms and were forced to move to large cities in Mexico and the United States.

Congressional Republicans, some Democrats and President Barack Obama are risking a repeat of these tragedies by pressing to pass a series of trade deals that were first negotiated by anti-labor President George W. Bush. In Colombia, Peru, South Korea, Panama and the United States, labor unions, environmental and human rights activists and concerned citizens are sounding the alarm about these dangerous deals.

Colombia is a special case, as it is the world leader in assassinating trade unionists. In the past 15 years, nearly 2,600 Colombian trade unionists have been killed by corrupt military and right-wing paramilitary forces, with some of the death squads paid by U.S. companies.

Payoffs for killing unionists

Chiquita Banana, for example, was fined $25 million by a U.S. court for paying off right-wing paramilitary terrorists.

Businesses such as Teléfonica, the Colombian communications company owned by the Spanish multinational Teléfonica, force their workers into so-called labor cooperatives that ban organizing and cancel minimum wage protection, said Colombian union leader Jose Orjela Garcia.

"How can American workers compete with workers who are not allowed a minimum wage or overtime and who get shot for trying to organize unions?" asked Congress member Linda Sanchez of California. "There's no freedom in this Free Trade Act."

President Obama opposed the FTA during his 2008 campaign, but he now supports the pact. Union and human rights activists are pressing to fulfill his campaign promise to not ratify the agreement.

For more information, check out the AFL-CIO's website at www.aflcio.org and Public Citizen at www.citizen.org.

Cunningham-Cook is a Jerry Wurf Union Scholar in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard. A student at Earlham College in Indiana, he is working with DC 37's Field Operations and Organizing Depts.