Globalization issues taking center stage in debates

By Raja Mishra, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003

American workers, facing record layoffs, look with worry at rising Third World economies, where wages and working conditions seem inhumanely low. How to compete? It's a burning question for trade unions, liberals, and working-class neighborhoods. It comes as no surprise, then, that the issue has been sharply debated by the Democratic presidential contenders.

John F. Kerry took the offensive last week in the New York debate. "Governor Dean, on a number of occasions across the country, has said very specifically that we should not trade with countries until they have labor and environment standards that are equal to the United States," the Massachusetts senator said. "That means we would trade with no countries."

Dean clarified his position: "I think the place to start is International Labor Organization standards adhered to and enforced by every one of our trading partners."

International Labor Organization standards? It sounds arcane. But with global trade growing, it's a crucial issue that will affect the lives of millions. Dennis Kucinich would scrap the nation's major free trade treaties, but the major Democratic candidates and President Bush generally support increased trade. The Democrats say, however, that they would do more than Bush to improve working conditions in developing nations. That's where ILO standards come in.

The ILO, a UN agency, advocates several worker rules: no child labor, freedom to organize unions, no forced labor, and no worker discrimination.

"If you're going to meddle in other countries' economies, which is what free trade treaties do, you might as well meddle in a way that will be helpful to the working people in those countries," said economist Josh Bivens of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

Dean, Kerry, John Edwards, Joseph I. Lieberman and Richard A. Gephardt agree. However, Bush -- and Bill Clinton before him -- did not insist on such standards in trade agreements. In the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, labor standards were relegated to an ineffectual side agreement. In free trade agreements with Singapore and Chile, signed this month by Bush, the standards were absent. Instead, these administrations requested that trading partners follow their own, oft-ignored labor laws.

"The dividing line is whether you force other countries to change their laws or not," said economist Claude E. Barfield of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who argues against requiring ILO standards because "as countries grow economically, through trade, they themselves begin to adopt social welfare and environmental laws."

More than ILO standards, US workers want to see wages rise in developing countries. As Kerry mentioned, Dean once said that trading partners should adopt American standards, including wages. But he retracted the statement, and no major candidate advocates forcing wage increases on trade partners.

Such a move might help US workers, but Keith Maskus, chairman of the University of Colorado's economics department, said that doing so could hurt poor nations. "Lower wages are precisely what allow poor countries to compete and grow," he said.