THE AFL-CIO trade union federation considers that the Fast Track trade policy has has helped depress wages for America’s workers over the past 20-plus years.
It states that ‘Fast Track is a trade policy in which Congress cedes its accountability over trade policy (the Constitution calls it ‘regulating Commerce with foreign Nations’) to the executive branch and promises to advance the trade deals the executive branch brings back in an accelerated process that allows no amendments and very limited debate.
‘The accountability that Congress gives up when it tells the executive branch to go negotiate an agreement makes no sense at all.
‘Instead of setting up mandatory negotiating goals – and requiring the executive branch to demonstrate it has achieved those goals before sending the trade agreement to Congress for a vote – Fast Track includes “negotiating objectives,” which the executive branch should only “make progress” toward.
‘And there is no independent evaluation that requires the executive branch to meet even that low bar.
‘Under Fast Track, Congress cedes its authority without guaranteeing that Americans get a good trade deal in return.
‘As a result, the executive branch has repeatedly sent bad deal after bad deal to Congress: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, the US-Korea trade agreement, just to name a few. And they’ve all passed under Fast Track.
‘And workers have paid the price for these bad trade deals: The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has determined that net job displacement since China entered the WTO in 2001 cost the US economy $37.0 billion in lost wages in 2011 alone!
‘And the impact has not been equal – it has displaced a disproportionately large number of good jobs for minority workers – 958,800 good jobs with excellent benefits, 35% of total jobs displaced.
‘And it’s not just the WTO that has harmed US workers. NAFTA has displaced nearly 700,000 jobs and has helped push wages down.
‘NAFTA strengthened the ability of US employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits.
‘As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labour.
‘In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico.
‘The same threats were used to fight union organising efforts. The message was: “If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border”.
‘This forced reduction in wages – to move US wages closer to the wages paid in Mexico, where unions face severe and, in some cases, violent repression – combined with anti-union tactics has had long-term negative effects on the US labour force.
‘While the trend clearly started during the Reagan era, NAFTA and other Fast Track trade agreements have exacerbated, rather than fixed, the problem.
‘And now Congress wants to pass another Fast Track law to allow more Fast Track trade agreements. Where is the evidence that these agreements have been good for working people? Where is the evidence that these agreements have grown the middle class?
‘We must say no to Fast Track. The promises of NAFTA-style agreements have thus far not lived up to the hype.
‘We have to fight for better policies that work for all of us – not just the 1%.’
• The lead attorney for 7,600 New Orleans public school employees who lost their jobs after Hurricane Katrina said he will ask the US Supreme Court to take up their case, after the Louisiana Supreme Court last Friday dismissed the long-running litigation.
The vote at the state court was 5-2, with Chief Justice Bernette Johnson and Associate Justice Jefferson Hughes dissenting.
The ruling was a stunning, wholesale reversal of trial and appeals court decisions that found for the plaintiffs, with damages to the Orleans Parish school system and the state estimated as high as $1.5 billion to pay the employees’ back pay and benefits.
The plaintiffs said the school system did not follow teacher tenure law in the layoffs, and that they should have been systematically rehired as schools reopened, either in the Orleans system, in the state Recovery School District or as charters.
But the case had ramifications beyond the public purse, and beyond the emotional and financial hit experienced by the employees, whose termination letters were in some cases delivered to houses that had been washed away in the storm.
It became a symbol for people who felt disenfranchised when the state, saying the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) had failed its children, took over four fifths of the city’s public schools in the fall of 2005.
Many teachers objected that they were all painted with the same brush as incompetent. And analysts such as former Loyola University professor Andre Perry said the layoffs knee-capped the city’s African American middle class.
All the state takeover schools that reopened after Katrina have become independent charter schools and are still under the auspices of the Recovery School District.
Most of the Orleans Parish system’s own schools became charters, leaving only six conventional schools directly controlled by the elected School Board.
The defendants in the suit – the School Board and the state – together argued that there were no jobs for employees to resume: Charters control their own hiring, and the Recovery system was required only to give the Orleans system’s laid-off employees ‘priority consideration’ – not to hire them.
That was not why the state Supreme Court dismissed the case, however. The majority invoked the principle of res judicata, which holds that a case cannot be argued if it covers the same people and arguments as a previous case.
Indeed, most of the individual plaintiffs were members of the United Teachers of New Orleans. That labour union in 2007 settled several similar lawsuits against the School Board for $7 million, about $1,000 per union member. The Supreme Court decided those settlements sufficiently addressed the plaintiffs and questions in the current case.
But the majority also accepted the defendants’ arguments across the line. Even if the case had not been dismissed, ‘neither the OPSB nor the State defendants violated plaintiffs’ due process rights,’ Justice Jeffrey Victory wrote.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeal had found that the School Board should have created a recall list and systematically used it to hire back employees.
The Supreme Court, on the other hand, while deciding that an employee hotline set up after the storm did not constitute an official recall list, determined that ‘imperfect’ post-Katrina responses were good enough to satisfy the state Constitution given the circumstances.
Furthermore, the fact that almost all the jobs disappeared permanently made a difference, Victory wrote: ‘The Teacher Tenure Laws did not envision, nor provide for, the circumstance where a massive hurricane wipes out an entire school district, resulting in the elimination of the vast majority of teaching positions in that district. It would defy logic to find the OPSB liable for a due process violation where jobs were simply not available.’
Nor would the state have been liable for not systematically hiring the Orleans Parish employees, Victory wrote, because the Legislature gave the Recovery School District the authority to hire whomever it wanted.
He noted that the Orleans Parish system did eventually restock the vast majority of its employees from its former payroll. And he cited evidence that the Recovery system did test and consider Orleans system applicants separately from the rest.
Act 1 of the 2012 legislative session, pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, has since eliminated many of the tenure protections that existed at the time of the storm.
Johnson, the chief justice whose election district includes New Orleans, dissented on all points. She wrote that the United Teachers of New Orleans case and the current suit ‘clearly involve entirely separate claims’.
Moreover, ‘I also believe the principle of res judicata should be balanced with the interests of justice,’ she wrote: The case should not be dismissed due to the state law that ‘exceptional circumstances’ may allow for reconsideration.
Johnson agreed with the 4th Circuit that the employees were not treated legally in the layoffs. ‘In my view, the record supports plaintiffs’ claims of due process violations,’ she wrote.
Orleans Parish interim schools Superintendent Stan Smith said he was surprised that the ruling came so swiftly, less than two months after attorneys made their arguments before the court. ‘We obviously were surprised and pleased at the same time,’ he said. Brent Barriere, the school system’s attorney, did not immediately return a call for comment.
Louisiana Federation of Teachers spokesman Les Landon said the union, which included United Teachers of New Orleans as an affiliate, was ‘extremely disappointed by the Supreme Court ruling.’
Lead plaintiffs’ attorney Willie Zanders, too, said, ‘We believe that the ruling of the two lower courts was correct.’
Zanders said it was too early to discuss the grounds on which the plaintiffs would appeal. And he did not immediately clarify why the plaintiffs would go next to the US Supreme Court, instead of a lower federal court.
The state Supreme Court’s decision stuck to legal arguments and principals. But Justice Greg Guidry added an unusual addendum that acknowledged the emotions in play: ‘The impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath upon the citizens of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana was devastating and will be long-lasting.
‘Equally affected were the plaintiffs, dedicated teachers and employees of the Orleans Parish School Board,’ he wrote. ‘Nevertheless, the facts of the case before us, and the law of this state, compel the result reached by the majority.’
