U.S. labour opposition is holding up the USMCA deal
WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump and top administration officials on Tuesday renewed pressure on Congress to ratify the U.s.-mexico-canada trade agreement (USMCA), after a major U.S. labour leader on Monday said there was more work to do on the deal.
The White House has dismissed House Democrats’ efforts to shore up enforcement of the trade agreement’s labour and environmental provisions, which are key union concerns, as purely political.
Trump accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Tuesday of being unable to get the bill “off her desk,” while claiming Democrats, unions and farmers were in favour. “She’s using USMCA, because she doesn’t have the impeachment votes,” the president said, without evidence.
Pelosi last week predicted a breakthrough in the talks was imminent. But she faces continued opposition from labour unions who felt burned by the North American Free Trade Agreement that became law in 1993.
Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), told union members in Maryland on Monday that NAFTA had been “a disaster for working people,” with Maryland alone losing more than 70,000 manufacturing jobs. “We’ve been lobbying the White House specifically on NAFTA for more than two years, slowly but surely moving the ball down the field. But we are not there yet,” Trumka said, according to excerpts of his remarks.
Trumka said there was pressure to “fold on core issues” to secure a deal, but vowed not to let that happen.
“Getting this done right is more important than getting it done fast. So until the administration can show us in writing that the new NAFTA is truly enforceable, with stronger labour standards, there is still more work to be done.”
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Tuesday said the agreement included much tighter environmental provisions and worker protections than any previous U.S. trade agreement.
“We have no doubt that if Speaker Pelosi lets it come to the floor, it will pass overwhelmingly,” Ross told a talk radio program at the White House on Tuesday, part of a series of interviews the Trump administration organized on the trade deal.