U.S. pledges to help improve Central America labor rights

WASHINGTON (AP)--Hoping to win congressional support for a free trade pact, the Bush administration June 9 pledged to devote more money and effort to improving labor rights in Central America.

As part of an aggressive campaign on behalf of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. President George W. Bush also met with normally pro-trade Democrats, many of whom are resisting the deal.

"If they had the votes, I never would have been invited to the White House today," Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY, said afterward.

Rangel said the president "made an eloquent argument" in favor of the agreement known as CAFTA. Rangel gave no indication that any minds were changed.

"You can't do something if you don't believe that the workers in these bills are protected. And that's the major problem we have," said Rangel, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, which handles trade matters.

The pact would eliminate most tariffs and other trade barriers between the U.S. and six Latin American nations -Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republican.

The House could vote on the agreement in the next month.

The deal is a hard sell in the House because many lawmakers say it would repeat some of the problems of the NAFTA trade deal with Mexico and Canada that took effect 11 years ago.

U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman, who attended the White House meeting, said he had "spent most of my time in the last few weeks listening and talking to Democrats" about their concerns.

Earlier, in a speech to a U.S.-Hispanic business group, Portman said he would seek to increase the $20 million already set aside to help the Central American nations with their labor and environmental standards.

Portman said he would try to organize an international conference before the end of July that would focus on helping those countries strengthen labor rights, enforce labor laws and combat discrimination.

Such steps would add to "the best agreement ever negotiated by the U.S. on labor rights," Portman said.

The agreement requires participating nations to enforce their own labor laws. Violations could bring as much as $15 million a year in fines, per occurrence.

Critics argue that some of the Central American nations have a poor record of labor law enforcement and that the deal would lead to further abuses, including crackdowns on unions and the use of child labor.

They say the agreement should require that signers abide by standards set by the International Labor Organization.

Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-OH, a leading foe of the agreement, wasn't impressed by Portman's approach.

"If the administration was serious about labor provisions, they would have negotiated them into the trade agreement in the first place," said Brown.

The agreement also isn't popular among Republicans from districts with textile manufacturers and sugar beet or sugar cane farmers. The U.S. sugar industry says the small increase in imports from Central America allowed under the deal would hurt U.S. producers.

Meantime, the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, June 9 released a letter in which former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said the agreement would enhance U.S. national security and influence in the Western Hemisphere because of "improved stability, democracy and development in our poor fragile neighbors."

Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, a candidate to return to the presidency of Costa Rica, was on Capitol Hill this week urging fence-sitters to back the deal.

The agreement, he told reporters, offered "a choice between making more prosperous the people of Central America or condemning them to live in poverty forever."

But Costa Rican parliamentarian and party leader Otton Solis, in a telephone interview with reporters, said the agreement would have serious consequences in his country. He said it would force the breakup of Costa Rica's telecommunications and electricity monopolies, to the detriment of Costa Ricans, and result in a flood of cheap U.S. food products that would hurt small-scale farmers in Costa Rica.

That, in turn, would compel more poor farmers to try to migrate to the U.S. or turn to the drug industry.

Date: 6/23/05

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