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With a close U.S. House vote looming on so-called presidential “fast-track” free trade authority, unionists and their allies stepped up their campaign to get lawmakers to turn down the scheme that would grease the skids for secret trade pacts.
In rallies, personal postings, e-mails, phone calls, and marches, unionists, community organizations, religious groups, environmentalists and more made it clear that fast-track hurts workers and everybody else, while aiding only the corporate class.
Besides the e-mails, marches and protests, unions set up a toll-free number, 855-712-8441 for calls to Congress.
Particular harm, they point out, comes from the Trans Pacific Partnership pact with 11 other Pacific Rim nations that fast-track would permit. TPP would emasculate workers’ rights, trash jobs, open the gates to even more corporate outsourcing and offshoring and endanger everything from Buy America laws to job safety and health.
And the workers are under the gun: House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, wants to vote on fast-track by the end of June. Other House sources predicted a vote by mid-June.
Fast-track would authorize secret talks for such trade deals – followed by up-or-down votes with little debate, no changes and no worker rights – on legislation implementing the TPP and other such pacts, not the pacts themselves.
The national AFL-CIO bought TV ads through June 14 in D.C., California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. In Sacramento, it ran classified ads in local papers and on Craigslist for “a congressman with backbone,” after Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., came out for fast-track. The New York State AFL-CIO rallied June 8 against Democratic Rep. Kathleen Rice’s fast-track flip-flop.
All the ads “focus on how fast-track will stifle America’s ingenuity and cost jobs by stacking the deck in favor of multinational corporations, driving down wages and undercutting our nation’s competitive edge,” the AFL-CIO said. Communications Director Eric Hauser said unions and their allies organized 650-plus anti-fast-track events, while thousands traveled to D.C. to lobby lawmakers, two million have called Congress, 18,000 sent handwritten letters, and digital ads against fast-track got 25 million hits.