Redefining fair trade

Chicago Tribune

July 21, 2005

By James Thindwa, Executive director, Chicago Jobs With Justice

The Tribune editorial board appears to have pulled out all stops to promote the
Central America Free Trade Agreement.

While you continue to make proclamations about CAFTA's promised benefits, you
will not acknowledge its serious flaws and risks.

A more honest assessment of CAFTA would recognize both its costs and benefits.

The question is not whether CAFTA will produce benefits but, rather, what the
costs will be and whether such costs can be mitigated through a better
agreement.

The Tribune has portrayed CAFTA as a simple cure for the country's economic
ills, especially job loss in the candy manufacturing industry.

In the article "Sugar blues; As the sweetener's high price drives candymakers
from Chicago, the 5,000 idled workers face a sour job market" (Magazine, July
10), writer Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin asserts that the exodus of "longtime
candymakers from Chicago is mainly [due to] the high price of U.S.-produced
sugar."

In this otherwise compelling article about the human cost of job loss, a single
paragraph reduces the rather complex relocation decisions of various companies
to one simple factor.

These decisions are, in fact, driven by many factors, chief among them payroll
costs.

If CAFTA "is small potatoes," as your editorial asserts, how can it solve such a
complex issue?

The significance of CAFTA seems to balloon when it comes to its promised
benefits but shrinks in terms of possible costs.

Where will standards for good-paying jobs and the rights of workers go?

According to the International Labor Rights Fund, CAFTA "will not serve to deter
labor rights abuses, nor will it effectively deter national governments from
downgrading their existing labor laws."

We should not sacrifice a level playing field for workers in exchange for small
increases in exports, which can be achieved in other ways.

Fair trade agreements can be arranged. CAFTA, however, offers working people
little if anything in exchange for extending the North American Free Trade
Agreement and World Trade Organization rules and restrictions that already
threaten jobs, health and environmental standards.

Both Democrats and Republicans should reject this bad deal, and instead work
with our hemispheric neighbors to forge a fair trade that delivers real
benefits to all.