For the past six months Democrats and Republicans have been trying to pass the Colombia-US free trade agreement, they just can’t agree on how to do that. Let’s put it first, no let’s lump it together with the Korean and Panama deals, well we can’t do anything unless labour rights are protected, well maybe the Colombian government doesn’t care about the FTA anymore if it can leverage more infrastructure money from China.
As in Canada, the majority of US labour, environmental and human rights organizations are opposed to free trade with Colombia. Colombian unions don’t support it either. The Latin American nation now holds the world’s top spot for internally displaced people, much of the problem linked to plantation agriculture and other industrial activities, and the economically related operations of paramilitary groups and drug gangs.
The difference between Ottawa and Washington is Obama took these serious concerns a little more seriously than the Conservatives and Liberals, who ratified an FTA with Colombia last year (it could take effect as early as July 1 this year). The result is a just announced “Action Plan” for moving the trade deal forward.
According to fact sheets released yesterday by the US Trade Representative’s office, President Obama insisted that a number of “serious and immediate labour concerns be addressed” before the U.S. could sign an FTA with Colombia. These include “violence against Colombian labor union members; inadequate efforts to bring perpetrators of murders of such persons to justice; and insufficient protection of workers’ rights in Colombia.”
The Canadian government was apparently too concerned about hurting former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe’s feelings to vocally criticize his government’s human rights record. While the economic effects of our economically pointless free trade agreement won’t be felt for some time (if ever) in Canada, the human impacts were immediate. Canada has started rejecting almost half of Colombian refugee claims since signing a deal when over the past decade the acceptance rate has hovered between 75 and 83 per cent, according to a recent news report. The free trade belief in free movement only applies to goods and investment, not people.
Under the US plan announced this week and designed to speed along passage of the US-Colombia FTA, the Colombian government would agree to:
– Expand existing protection programs for union leaders to provide protection for activists and workers, eliminate the backlog of requests to get on the protection program, and improve it so it covers teachers.
– “Enact, by June 15, a reform of the Criminal Code to criminalize and penalize actions or threats that could adversely affect fundamental workers’ rights, including threats against labor organizers and otherwise interfering with worker’s rights to organize and bargain collectively, with up to five years’ imprisonment.”
– Ramp up prosecution support for cases involving crimes against union members.
– Hold monthly meetings with each union confederation to reconcile lists of outstanding unionist homicides.
– Accelerate the use of fines to penalize employment relationships that undermine workers rights, hire 480 new labour inspectors, dedicate 100 of them for abuses of cooperatives to deny worker rights, conduct an outreach program to inform workers of their rights by June 2011, etc.
Problem solved? No way. The United Steelworkers and AFL-CIO were quick to respond and repeat their opposition to the free trade agreement. Here’s the USW:
The reality on the ground in Colombia has not changed since the agreement was first signed. A record 52 unionists were killed in Colombia last year. Since 1986, only five percent of more than 2,800 union killings have been prosecuted, making impunity the standard for justice in the killings. This year alone, six unionists have been killed in Colombia, including two in the past week, even as the U.S. and Colombia were finalizing their new accord over the FTA.
These two most recent victims, Hector Orozco and Gildardo Garcia of the agricultural union known as Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima, were killed in a heavily militarized zone and were in fact threatened by the official Colombian army just before their killing.
Leo Gerrard, president of USW, vowed to continue their years-long work “in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the Colombian labor movement who are taking to the streets today to show their continued opposition to the FTA.”
The AFL-CIO release thanked Obama for being open to the idea of attempting to protect labour and human rights activists through the trade negotiations, but addressed shortcomings with the proposed action plan, which the union says:
does not go nearly far enough in laying out concrete benchmarks for progress in the areas of violence and impunity, nor does it address many of the ways in which Colombian labor law falls short of international standards. There is no guarantee that the terms of it will in fact lead to a reduction in violence, and no backup plan to delay implementation if the violence and impunity continue. Furthermore, the Action Plan is a stand-alone agreement, not connected to the benefits conferred in the trade agreement. Once the trade agreement is ratified by Congress and implemented, the U.S. government will have no leverage whatsoever to enforce its terms in the event that the terms are not implemented as agreed.
There’s good reason to doubt the Colombian government will want to or be able to carry out the improvements suggested in the action plan. According to the AFL-CIO:
The conviction rate for union murders and other violence is in the single digits, and even where prosecutions have occurred, many perpetrators have been charged in absentia and are still on the loose. Union density in Colombia is below 5 percent, and even fewer workers can exercise their right to bargain collectively. We have no doubt that if 51 CEOs had been murdered in Colombia last year, this deal would be on a very slow track indeed.
There’s also little evidence a Colombia FTA will have a positive effect on the US economy. US Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, lumping the Korea, Panama and Colombia trade agreements together, said Wednesday, “Millions of working families have been devastated by the disastrous trade policies of the past. Now, the Obama administration is trotting out the same failed policies as if by some miracle they will have a different effect this time. They won’t.”
In Canada, the federal government is in the process of developing a methodology for the vague “human rights impact assessment” process that the Liberals included in the FTA in order to secure its passage last year. While Canadian groups (and a 2008 all-party trade committee report) were calling on an independent assessment of the likely effect of an FTA prior to its ratification, the Liberal motion and amendment committed to performing these assessments afterwards. The Conservatives included no money in the FTA legislation to help with these assessments, and no direction on who should be involved in preparing them.
Canada’s poor human rights record has entered election talk here and there. His total apathy to human rights abuses perpetrated by prospective trading partners is getting less attention. There’s no way the Canada-Colombia FTA should have passed, or the Canada-Panama or Canada-Peru FTAs for that matter. Our trade deals are about protecting Canadian mining, resource, finance and agri-business firms operating in unstable foreign destinations — to protect them, that is, from democratic attempts to regulate their activities or persecute crimes against workers and the environment.
US groups are absolutely right to reject Obama’s phony human rights promises for Colombia just so US agricultural exporters and importers can add pennies to their profits, and North America mining firms can continue to pillage without consequence.
