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A lame-duck President Obama and the nation’s top business lobby will team up to take advantage of favorable political conditions for a massive, post-election push for the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal, unions warn.
That’s the prediction of Shane Larson, legislative director for the Communications Workers of America, who is urging his union’s activists – and others – to keep the pressure on lawmakers to vote against the TPP, even after the Nov. 8 general election.
Larson gave that forecast to CWA’s Legislative-Political Conference, meeting in Washington, D.C., this week. Campaigning against the TPP, or, more precisely, against Obama administration legislation to implement the TPP, was one of the top issues discussed by the 600 delegates.
Larson predicted that Obama and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the TPP’s top backers, would wait until after the election to bring it up in a “lame-duck” session of Congress.
Political conditions will be right to shove the deal through, he said. That’s because the lame-duck session of the 114th Congress will include many lawmakers, defeated or retiring, who are free to vote for jobs-losing “free trade” pacts, regardless of what constituents want.
The TPP would open the U.S. to a flood of goods from the 11 other Pacific Rim nations that signed the pact, including low-wage nations such as Vietnam and Brunei. It also lacks enforceable labor rights, workers and their allies point out.
Obama’s own International Trade Commission says it would cost 128,000 factory jobs and add $22 billion to the annual U.S. trade deficit. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, one of the leading foes of the trade pact, reminded delegates the TPP includes a secret trade court, run by pro-business trade lawyers.
“A company in another country” could sue in those courts “over a good, strong labor provision” – federal, state or local – and win, Brown told CWA members. “Our trade deals amount to corporate handouts and worker sellouts.”