President Obama has been promoting trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama, saying such agreements could help stoke job creation in the United States. But some advocacy groups say the agreements don't meet Obama's campaign promises to include labor and environmental standards.
The trade agreements are also caught up in a separate legislative battle: Obama wants Congress to approve the agreements in tandem with funding for a jobs retraining program, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance. Republicans have opposed that funding, on the grounds of fiscal austerity. So Obama has not yet submitted the trade agreements to Congress for approval.
Still, the text of the agreements are public. Do they include the promised environmental and labor standards?
Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that monitors trade, says no. They've produced a detailed comparison of what Obama promised and what the trade agreement with Korea actually contains. Public Citizen says the Korean government has used its laws to imprison labor leaders, and employers have used police to break up labor union activity. Those laws could continue to be used if the current agreements stay in place.
The group is also concerned about provisions that allow companies to dispute laws that hurt their business and to make those challenges in special tribunals outside of the host country's normal legal system. These provisions were part of NAFTA and are replicated in the new agreement, Public Citizen said, and they're a way for companies to skirt laws designed to protect workers and the environment.
Finally, Public Citizen pointed out that Obama made a specific campaign promise to include International Labor Organization conventions (as opposed to the more lenient ILO principles) in trade agreements. But the new agreements don't include the conventions.
The Obama administration, on the other hand, says that the trade agreements do include labor and environmental standards, and ones that are tougher than NAFTA. For example, the agreements include bipartisan standards hammered out during the Bush administration on May 10, 2007, and subsequently known as the May 10 standards.
The administration said it would not be appropriate to include the ILO conventions as a standard, because those conventions haven't been fully ratified by the U.S. Senate.
The administration also points out that the Korea agreement has been endorsed by the United Auto Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Finally, we should note that the standards depend on some very technical legal specifications for international trade, and different trade agreements use the standards in different ways. The differences are not trivial, either.
For example, Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich. and the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, favors the Korea and Panama agreements. But he opposes the Colombia agreement because he believes there will be problems enforcing negotiated protections for labor.
As we noted before, the agreements have not yet been submitted. Having said all that, it's clear the agreements do include some form of environmental and labor protections. But it's also clear they fall short of some of the morespecific promises Obama made during the campaign. We rate this promise Compromise.