Photo by Herald Grandstaff

John J. Sweeney

Correctly predicting that the focus of the World Trade Organization's meeting in Seattle would not be on WTO ministers but in the streets, AFL-CIO Pres. John J. Sweeney vowed unions and their allies will "turn up the heat" to make trade treaties answerable to working families.

In an address to National Press Club members prior to the Seattle WTO meeting, where tens of thousands of workers and students marched to protest global labor and environmental trade issues, Sweeney also predicted that the "confrontation in Seattle will signal an end to the era of trade accords negotiated behind closed doors and the beginning of a new era in which working families participate in trade decisions that affect our lives."

Sweeney said analysts offer only two options – free trade or protectionism. That is "nonsense," he said. "The real debate is not over whether to be part of the global economy but over what are the rules for that economy and who makes them. . . ."

The five-year-old WTO is the "capstone of the corporate-dominated world marketplace," Sweeney said. With no regard for labor standards, environmental hazards, or consumer protections, he said, the WTO oversees and enforces rules of the global economy, arbitrates trade conflicts, and claims the authority to challenge state and national laws.

Sweeney cited the example of an asbestos ban in France, where the cancer-causing substance kills an estimated 2,000 workers a year. That ban was challenged under WTO rules. In Massachusetts, voters were told that their choice to boycott business with the slave labor regime in Burma would not be allowed by the WTO.

"The attempt to bring China and its repressive government into the WTO intensifies our determination," Sweeney said, "because we believe it is less likely to reform China as its advocates claim than it is to further deform the WTO" and detract from the WTO's "already questionable legitimacy."

Sweeney said: "Over the past 25 years, the global economy has produced slower growth and greater inequality in both less-developed and industrial nations," he said. "Financial collapses have grown more severe and more frequent."

"Working families have suffered most," Sweeney said, "because indebted countries have little choice but to compete by lowering their own standards, establish export processing zones, outlaw worker organizing, waive environmental laws, ignore food safety and public health regulations, and slash social spending."

The result, Sweeney said, is some 250 million children forced to work, tens of thousands of workers in forced labor and prison camps making products "that enrich global corporations and dictatorial governments," and millions of workers who make less than a living wage making products they can't afford to buy.

Photo by Herald Grandstaff

John Folk

Sweeney said that the United States lost more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 18 months to low wage imports. He introduced Steelworkers local leader John Folk, who was one of 1,100 workers who lost their jobs at the profitable Huffy Corp. bike factory in Celina, Ohio. Huffy last year decided to move operations to Mexico and import more bikes from China, where unions are not allowed, he said.

"Seattle marks the beginning of a new order," Sweeney said. "The popular protest in Seattle escalates the struggle to make the global economy work for the many and not just the few."