International Law

Obama, Labor and China

By Stan

Now that the Obama trade and foreign policy team is in place, there are new stories floating around out there about his China policy. The one thing everyone is nervous about is summarized quite well in this Reuters piece:

President-elect Barack Obama may face pressure early in his administration to use the threat of trade sanctions to force China to improve conditions for workers, an American labor official said on Monday.

"We are interested in resubmitting the China workers rights case," and expect to raise the issue with the incoming U.S. team early in 2009, Thea Lee, policy director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, told Reuters.

The United States’ largest labor organization filed a petition in March 2004 and again in June 2006 asking the Bush administration to investigate whether China’s "persistent denial of basic workers rights" gives it an unfair trade advantage that warrants U.S. sanctions in response.

Normally, this would mean a lot of huffing and puffing by certain members of Congress, perhaps some sort of speech by the president, and maybe the appearance of a tougher negotiating stance against China. At the end, however, I would expect that nothing would really change.

While I still maintain that opinion, it’s hard to tell how nasty the rhetoric will get next year as the economic situation continues to worsen.

I am a supporter of labor generally, but I do admit that the nationalistic, protectionist side of the labor movement does piss me off at times. On this issue, the U.S. Congress and organized (union) labor in the U.S. often talk in terms of the rights of workers. It sounds very altruistic, as if everyone was looking out for the interests of the poor laborers in the Pearl River Delta.

But it’s all bullshit of course. It’s about saving jobs at home, and the reason why no one is talking about the working conditions in the Congo or Myanmar is that the volume of trade between those countries and the U.S. is nonexistent. And yet we hear a lot of speeches about labor rights.

Just for fun, I thought I would refresh my memory about these labor rights. I went straight to the source, the International Labor Organization web site. After several fruitless attempts to load the site, and after pinging the ILO site and wondering whether it’s blocked by the GFW (is it?), I found a copy of the ILO Declaration on a third party site. The core rights here include:

(a) freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining;

(b) the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour;

(c) the effective abolition of child labour; and

(d) the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

Now, we can talk about collective bargaining, but I think China does OK compared to a lot of other countries when it comes to the other things on that list. There are a lot of other countries out there who are in gross violation of those principles, yet for some reason, I don’t see Senators Schumer or Graham on tv talking about them — just China.

So we might get some China bashing next year from the U.S., and it wouldn’t surprise me if it comes from organized labor. And if I whine about it and call these guys protectionists, I just hope that I’m not labeled a reactionary/conservative type. That always hurts.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on December 29, 2008 (boomark / email).