LABOR’S SELFISH POWER PLAY ON TRADE
PRESIDENT Obama, elected and reelected with significant majorities of the popular vote, believes that the American people would benefit if he gets authority from Congress to negotiate international trade agreements and then submit them to both houses for approval on an expedited basis.
A bipartisan majority of the Senate favors granting him this power, known as tradepromotion authority, or “fast track,” which his two predecessors also enjoyed. Ditto for a bipartisan majority of the House.
The main thing standing in the way of this democratic tide, however, is the political clout of organized labor, which opposes fast track and the tradeexpanding agreements it would enable.
Wielding a threatened cutoff of campaign cash, the AFLCIO pressured House Democrats into the moral equivalent of a filibuster, casting Obama’s trade agenda into limbo. (Fasttrack finally passed the House Thursday, but it’s future in the Senate is still uncertain.)
Labor’s waging this countermajoritarian battle in the name of “working people,” who, it says, would otherwise face another wave of lowwage foreign competition like those sup unleashed by earlier “bad” trade deals. Labor leaders consider their moral authority axiomatic in this matter, even though they represent just 11.1 percent of the labor force. On top of that, Obama’s trade agenda affects at most only a minority of union members. Trade deals, by definition, affect industries that produce tradeable goods, such as cars or coal. Yet as David Wessel of the Brookings Institution has noted, only about 10 percent of union members produce tradeable goods; the rest work in construction, government and other sectors outside the flow of global commerce. For these workers, cheap imports are either irrelevant or, to the extent they consume them, beneficial. Additionally, 92 percent of the trade affected by the TPP would be with countries that are either highwage, already have bilateral free trade with the United States or both. So if the threat to workers, even union workers, is so modest, what explains the labor leadership’s allout attack on Obama’s agenda, other than sheer force of antitrade habit?
It can’t be the arcane menace posed by the TPP’s investorstate dispute mechanism, whose potential to disrupt US regulations through arbitration is grossly exaggerated by the unions. As for the purportedly excessive “secrecy” of the TPP negotiations, if anyone understands the absurdity of that complaint, it should be people who do their own collective bargaining behind closed doors.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, for today’s tribunes of the working class, this is not really about trade, or jobs, or wages, but politics — indeed, specialinterest politics of a pretty raw vari ety.
The fasttrack fight represents something between a do-or-die test of the unions’ residual clout and a golden opportunity for them to unify by exploiting a perennial hotbutton issue. The prize is nothing less than power over the post Obama Democratic Party. The AFLCIO has already achieved a lot in that regard, by forcing so many House Democrats to choose labor over a president of their own party. Labor has forced presump- tive presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton to equivocate on a trade plan she advocated as secretary of state; the unions rolled House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, too, which is no mean feat. It must have been a heady moment for AFLCIO President Richard Trumka when Pelosi’s caucus received him almost as Obama’s equal last week.
And the country? TPP’s likely a net positive, both economically and strategically. A key purpose of the deal is to cement US support for Japan in return for Japan’s opening its markets to US goods. The 12nation, “TransPacific” aspect gives Prime Minister Shinzo Abe diplomatic cover to carry out domestically controversial but advantageous measures.
All of this helps counter China, politically and economically. You would’ve thought labor might be sympathetic to such a strategy, given its complaints about China’s conduct.
Instead, the United States’ entire position in Asia is at risk, thanks largely to the machinations of a Washington interest group that once plausibly spoke for Middle America but increasingly speaks, and acts, only for itself.