Not about trade

Thanks to campaign groups and the trade union movement across Europe and the US, TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), an EU-US trade deal that threatens to make privatisation of public services such as the NHS irreversible, has become a household name.
It’s one that millions of people unequivocally reject once the consequences of such an agreement being passed become clear – a race to the bottom in labour and environmental standards, and governments being held ransom by a global corporate juggernaut vying for world domination.
But Workers Uniting, a global trade union alliance between Unite and the North American union, United Steelworkers, argues that TTIP is only the beginning.
It is just one of various “new generation” trade agreements now being negotiated, including CETA, TiSA and TPP, whose raison d’etre is deregulation on an extreme scale, which would enable corporations to run roughshod over governments and the citizens who’ve elected them.
United Steelworkers’ director of international affairs Ben Davis argues that new generation agreements have little to do with historic agreements.
“These agreements are not about trade; they’re not about making it easier to move goods from one country to another,” said Davis. “This is especially true with agreements like TTIP and CETA, where we’re talking about countries in which barriers to trade are not all that significant in the first place.”
Instead, Davis said that these agreements exist to “facilitate the unregulated flow of capital across borders,” and added that the bank scandals that have rocked the world for the past 10 years – including the latest HSBC scandal – are a necessary consequence of this unregulated flow.
Fast track
More than simply rejecting the terms of these agreements, Workers Uniting argues that new trade deals are inherently undemocratic because of the secrecy with which they are negotiated.
The millions of people who will be directly affected by the consequences of such deals will have virtually no say, and in America, not even their elected representatives will have much input.
Davis explains the process of “fast-track,” which, he says, enables legislation to be pushed through the American Congress with hardly any time to debate and without the ability of government representatives to table amendments.
“You have to understand these agreements are often 6,000 pages long,” he said. “With fast-track, if you aren’t given any time to look through it. And if even if you did, it’s written in highly technical language – you’re essentially in the situation that you’re pushing something through without understanding any of it.
“Negotiations are then left in the hands of a handful of bureaucrats and several corporate representatives who essentially hold all the cards – they actually have more say in the whole process than our elected officials do.”
American unions have heavily campaigned against fast-track, an authority that the President Barack Obama is currently seeking. Davis says if fast-track is approved, then hope lies primarily in Europe, where efforts at transparency on these trade deals have been much stronger.
“The groundswell of public anger in reaction to TTIP has really caused both EU member state governments and the European parliament to say, ‘Well we can’t just wring our hands and do whatever the Americans tell us to do.’” Davis said.
“And I think Greece plays a big part of that,” he added, referring to anti-austerity party Syriza’s recent victory, which could mean new generation trade agreements will be more easily blocked if they require the agreement of each EU member state.
“The negotiation of these trade agreements is occurring in the context of a failed policy of austerity in Europe and I think people are starting to see the connections.”
CETA: the silent trade deal
Although TTIP has received the most publicity, CETA, a Canadian-EU trade deal, whose text has been finalised and is ready for passage, arguably poses a greater threat to working people and public services.
“CETA was negotiated by an unequivocally right wing government which has absolutely no interest in enforceable labour standards,” argued Davis. “Whereas TTIP is at least being negotiated by an administration that has some social conscience, there is absolutely nothing in CETA for workers.”
Workers Uniting says CETA uses very broad language with investor-state dispute provisions in place that enables corporations to sue governments in secret courts, if these governments attempt to bring privatised services back into public hands.
Although emphasis has been placed on removing such provisions, known as ISDS, from TTIP, the provisions form a core part of CETA, which is poised to be pushed through much sooner than the EU-US trade deal.
If ISDS remains a part of CETA, then even an ISDS-less TTIP can still mean US multinationals can sue governments through CETA’s back door, since many US corporations have subsidiaries in Canada.
“If there is one thing we want people to focus on in the next few months, it’s pressuring governments and MEPs to reject CETA with the ISDS provisions in place,” Davis urged.
Citizen involvement
In the face of mammoth international trade agreements whose negotiations are dominated by corporate representatives, the odds look stacked against working people who are at the mercy of big business.
But such agreements have been defeated before, and they can be defeated again.
Davis points to campaigns against trade agreements in the 1990s, which stopped the passage of the MAI and the FTAA.
“Those victories resulted from really sustained public campaigns and protest. In Seattle, Mexico, central America, everywhere, there was sustained citizen involvement.”
But Davis contends that this time around, global capital is stronger and even more sustained campaigning, political pressure and public education will be needed.
“At the time of the FTAA and MAI, things weren’t great, but I think the relative balance between capital and government was a little bit more in favour of governments then than it is now,” he said.
“If we are to defeat these trade agreements, we really have to ask ourselves – should working people have any power in the global economy, or do we simply accept the agenda of radically increasing inequality with all of the social turbulence and disruption and suffering that this inequality generates?”
Workers Uniting has said in statement that we all must redouble our efforts. To see how you can get involved in the fight against new generation trade agreements, find out more here.