The Guardian 20 April, 2005
AFL-CIO blasts CAFTA
WASHINGTON: With hearings set to start on the controversial Central American Free
Trade Agreement, the AFL-CIO issued a scathing critique of the trade pact, saying it
would hurt Latin American workers as well as their US colleagues.
"CAFTA's rules on labour rights are so poor they backtrack from existing US laws that require
Central American governments and employers to respect workers' rights in exchange for
unilateral trade preferences", says the federation's report, titled The Real Record on Workers
Rights in Central America.
Currently, trade between the US and the five Central American nations and the Dominican
Republic, which signed CAFTA, is governed by the old, pre-World Trading Organisation
"Generalised System of Preferences (GSP)", the report explains.
CAFTA "lowers the standard on labour rights [which] countries are currently required to meet
under GSP ... and eliminates enforcement tools available" from that.
"Workers in the US will be pitted against their fellow workers in Central America, causing
downward pressure on US wages, increasing the leverage of employers to squelch union
organising drives and destroying good jobs", as happened under NAFTA, the AFL-CIO report
says.
Central American labour federations oppose CAFTA and have led street protests against it.
CAFTA will not do anything to pull people out of poverty in Central America, says AFL-CIO
Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. That, she says, "explains why working
families in the US and Central America oppose CAFTA."
People's Weekly World