TLC Action Plan: Bilateral Labor Ploy

When I was in the United States Congress in 2005, showing the lesions that TLC could bring to Colombia, Democratic representatives voiced fear that this agreement will increase North American job displacement. In a recent letter to President Obama, they synthesized their position: “For too long, American workers saw that the NAFTA-style trade agreements sent their jobs overseas. It is necessary to assure them that all Americans will see and feel the benefits of trade, not only a special interest class.”

This sentiment includes 60 percent of Republican voters, who believe that free trade has damaged their country. Citizen groups — like Public Citizen — say that, because of globalization, the United States “has seen economic stagnation, net loss of jobs and wages just to keep up with inflation.” Other congressmen insist on trade agendas that reflect “American values,” “opening up foreign markets for American exporters, strengthening our trade defense measures against unfair imports”; they promote a project, HR 496: Trade Enforcement Act of 2009, which is not law but could be like an addendum to the agreement with Colombia. The plan of action demands the safeguarding of jobs, unions, collective bargaining, inspectors and safety. First and foremost is the concern to impede North American protectionist “labor dumping”; that neither the Colombian exports be in vile conditions nor the Yankees’ imports be produced by “garbage” contracted labor.

Some think of the benefits for the national working class. However, after looking at the reality of the labor world of Colombia, these illusions collapse. Studies show that with the TLC imports grow more than exports, and this causes unemployment. This way double-digit unemployment, which arrived in February of 2011 at 12.8 percent, or 2.8 million people, will not decrease; neither will informality cease, the main principle of engagement, which in the DANE calculations closed in 2010 at 55.3 percent; nor underemployment, since, of the 229,000 jobs created between 2010 and 2011, 210,000 were for the underemployed, which is 92 percent — the second highest total since 2001.

Obama hopes that the AFL-CIO and other unions will think that their jobs will not be at risk with the AFL with Colombia and that Santos will be seen as a champion of decent employment — a joint effort to deceive. Free trade cannot escape the axiom set by Francisco Mosquera: “Super unemployment in the North, super pillage in the South.” To cure the evils of free trade with free trade is to treat an illness with the virus that caused it, a contradiction and, ultimately, a hoax.