Trade Tops Agenda of AFL-CIO Executive Council
Representing manufacturing, production, maintenance and sanitation workers in the baking, confectionery, tobacco and grain milling industries.
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21 Mar Trade Tops Agenda of AFL-CIO Executive Council

Posted at 09:10h in NAFTA, Trade by

BCTGM International President David Durkee was among labor leaders from across the country who gathered in New Orleans last week as part of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council meeting to map out the path ahead for labor. From trade and public education to equal pay and paid leave to back pay for federal contract workers and bargaining power for all, the Executive Council discussed issues that will define working people’s fight for economic justice in 2019 and beyond.

In a powerful statement released last week, the Executive Council announced:

“if the administration insists on a premature vote on the new [North American Free Trade Agreement] in its current form, we will have no choice but to oppose it.”

After meeting with their Canadian and Mexican counterparts, labor leaders emphasized that trade policy must further the advancement of a just, inclusive and sustainable economy for all working people—and that our movement would mobilize to defeat any deal that doesn’t meet that standard, just as we defeated the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Read the Executive Council March 14 statement: Trade Must Build an Inclusive Economy for All

Here are a few highlights from the statement:

  • Trade policy must be judged by whether it leads to a just, inclusive and sustainable economy….By that measure, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has driven the outsourcing of so many good jobs, has been a catastrophic failure.
  • By design, NAFTA distorted power relationships in favor of global employers over workers, weakened worker bargaining power and encouraged the de-industrialization of the U.S. economy.
  • After a quarter-century of this race to the bottom, workers in all three NAFTA countries find it more difficult to form unions and negotiate collective bargaining agreements.
  • The NAFTA renegotiation requires strong labor rights provisions and strong enforcement provisions that as of today are not yet in the agreement.
  • The current effort by the business community to pass the new NAFTA is premature, and if it continues, we will be forced to mobilize to defeat it, just as we mobilized to kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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