by Jeff Ballinger, former national director of SDUSA. This piece was first published in Labor Notes on October 4, 2011.

These Korean unionists protested the impending free trade deal. Experience with previous trade deals makes it obvious global brands like Walmart like the current sweatshop system just the way it is. Photo: KCTU.
It’s a cruel joke that Democratic politicians are trotting out language about “labor standards” to defend imminent trade agreements with Colombia, Korea, and Panama. President Barack Obama sent Congress all three deals Monday, and lawmakers are expected to move quickly to approve them before the Korean president arrives October 13. If legislators OK the deals as they stand, they will have no learned nothing from previous trade pacts. Just look at the labor rights requirements in the 2001 U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement. These “protections” include boilerplate “core labor standards” on non-discrimination and rights to organize and bargain. The stalwart anti-sweatshop team of Charlie Kernaghan and Barbara Briggs at the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights uncovered a different story on the ground. They reported last year that in one Jordanian factory, 1,200 guest workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India—75 percent of them women—had been trafficked, stripped of their passports, and held under conditions of indentured servitude. Workers had been cheated of their promised wages, earning an average of just 35 cents an hour. The minimum wage in Jordan is 74.5 cents. The women were paid, at most, just $35.77 a week. The “labor rights” protections of that trade agreement proved an empty promise. Continue reading