NAFTA re-negotiation started Wednesday morning at Washington DC’s Marriott Hotel, but corporate voices dominate at the negotiation table. And the actual text of the rules being re-negotiated is classified information, shutting out the public.

The AFL-CIO’s Celeste Drake is at the NAFTA re-negotiation table for working people. She says working people need a complete re-writing of NAFTA rules to eliminate the corporate domination.

Celeste Drake: “I want to emphasize it’s not a tweak here, you know add a comma there, delete a sentence and then we’re done.

And the labor issues are critically important.

But you cannot fix the pro-corporate bent of NAFTA or other existing U.S. trade agreements by just looking at labor obligations isolation.”

That’s because NAFTA’s real problem for working people is that it elevates principles of mobility of capital and protection of corporate profit above all other values.

Drake says one example is the ISDS – Investor-State Dispute Settlement – provisions that create private courts for investors to settle their disputes by essentially suing nations whenever profits or capital mobility are impeded by democratic governance.

She says for NAFTA to really work for working people that core corporate privilege must be taken out. Drake says the US Trade Representative wants to move very fast and have NAFTA re-negotiation wrapped up by December.

She says that’s too fast to really re-negotiate a working family friendly NAFTA, given all the complexities. The AFL-CIO is urging a slower, more deliberate and careful process.

Celeste Drake: “We are much more likely to come closer to achieving our goals if time is spent making this a good deliberative, pro-worker thing. Not a quick and dirty negotiation

that’s just gonna create more pro-corporate rules behind closed doors.”

 

http://workersindependentnews.com/2017/08/16/at-the-top-secret-nafta-re-...

By Doug Cunningham