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News Briefs

Date Posted: August 5 2005

Dems derided for helping CAFTA
CAFTA - the Central American Free Trade Agreement - was approved by a slim 217-215 vote in the U.S. House last week after earlier approval by the Senate.

President Bush is certain to sign the agreement, which will lower trade barriers between the U.S. and six Central American nations: Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

"Under the president's administration, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs," said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "He is still in the net-loss column for manufacturing jobs. So as our manufacturing base erodes, as our industrial base erodes, we have a president who is contributing to the further erosion of that base."

Organized labor has maintained that the agreement, modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), will lead to further U.S. job losses as multinational firms transfer production to use Central America's rock-bottom wages, income inequality, weak labor laws and non-existent enforcement.

The vote count for the agreement included 15 House Democrats (none from Michigan), who joined 202 Republicans in favor. In addition, 27 Republican members of Congress joined 187 Democrats and 1 Independent in voting against CAFTA: Lawmakers faced intense pressure to pass the measure from the Bush Administration.

The day after CAFTA passed, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called the 15 Democrats and 202 GOPers "sellouts of working men and women."

Labor was particularly upset that three of the Democrats - Reps. Melissa Bean of Illinois, Jim Matheson of Utah and Dennis Moore of Kansas - voted for the Bush Administration's legislation to implement CAFTA just a week after they were among the beneficiaries of a labor-assembled fundraiser that raised $300,000.

Fire Fighters President Harold Schaitberger, chair of the federation's political committee, said the first move of union presidents who contributed "would be to see if we legally can get our money back."

Better times for union busters?
CHICAGO (PAI) - The United Food and Commercial Workers' leaders wasn't at the AFL-CIO Convention in Chicago last week, but their big cause - Wal-Mart - was.

Convention delegates voted unanimously on July 27 to support the union's national "Wake-Up Wal-Mart" campaign.

The campaign is designed to shine a bright light on the behemoth retailer and its anti-worker actions, including rock-bottom and poverty wages, lack of affordable health care benefits, flagrant labor law-breaking and its ability to force its suppliers to cut their workers' wages and benefits or move to cheap labor areas, notably China.

The AFL-CIO said it and its member unions "commit to supporting UFCW's national Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign to build a nationwide grass-roots movement by organizing local community coalitions throughout the country" against the million-worker retailer.

The resolution also pledged AFL-CIO support for UFCW's efforts to take the campaign global "to ensure that Wal-Mart's anti-union business model does not become established internationally."

UFCW leaders, including President Joe Hansen, were not at the convention. They were part of the Change to Win coalition and decided to boycott it. Two other coalition members, SEIU and the Teamsters, withdrew from the AFL-CIO, and UFCW may follow, as Hansen told federation President John J. Sweeney in a previous letter.