Stay out of the TPP
From the AFL-CIO
Working people want to move forward on trade, not backward. President Donald Trump’s reported interest in reviving the Trans-Pacific Partnership is the wrong idea. He should focus on upgrading the protections for worker freedoms in the ongoing negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Three years ago, a united movement of working people rose in opposition to Fast Track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, upsetting the conventional wisdom and changing the course of American trade policy.
Our opposition had nothing to do with political parties. It was a grassroots groundswell, and it came after years in which trade experts from the AFL-CIO and our member unions offered feedback, detailed testimony and policy language to the trade negotiators, who simply allowed corporations to have too much control over the proposed deal.
Trump saw the changing dynamic and made new rules on trade a centerpiece of his campaign. One of the only promises he has fulfilled to working people has been to withdraw the United States from the TPP.
Yet after months of negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which still has huge problems regarding protections for the freedom of working people, Trump has indicated a sudden interest in coming back to the TPP. To rejoin the job-killing, wage-lowering TPP would be the ultimate betrayal of promises made to working families to fix America’s trade problem.
2 million: That’s how many American jobs were lost in 2015 alone because of currency manipulation and bad trade rules with Trans-Pacific Partnership countries, a situation the TPP would have worsened.
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