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TRADE POLICYChinaThe fight in Congress over granting PNTR for China was the major trade battle in 2000. It pitted the united labor movement and environmental, religious, family farm and other progressive groups against multinational corporations and the business organizations they support. The leadership of both major political parties supported granting PNTR to China and the Clinton administration was fully engaged in winning this fight for "free trade." Despite the strong UAW campaign against PNTR, Congress approved this measure. At stake was U.S. treatment of China as a new member of the World Trade Organization, as just another trading partner, despite China’s history of consistently violating trade agreements, viciously repressing democracy for its citizens and forcing foreign companies to invest in China, transfer technology there, expand their exports and limit imports. In the end, China did not join the WTO last year, even though Congress provided PNTR. And the stumbling block to China’s entry was its reluctance to put into writing the full measure of the promises made in negotiations with the U.S. and other countries to open its market and to accept and enforce all the obligations of the WTO’s rules. Difficult negotiations on these specific issues pushed the discussions into 2001 and the successful conclusion of those negotiations is not certain. The UAW has told the administration to hold firm on enforcing all of the commitments made by China. Whether China joins the WTO or not, if the current U.S. trade policy does not change, the U.S. trade deficit with China will keep climbing. The value of China’s exports to the U.S. is more than six times the value of its imports from here. Those exports cover a wide variety of products and include a growing volume of sophisticated manufactured goods, including auto parts and aerospace products. China is attracting investments by multinational corporations in both of these industries and promoting exports remains a priority of the Chinese government. As China’s economy grows and its integration with the global economy increases, the impact on the U.S. and other countries of China’s repression of workers’ rights becomes a more pressing problem. International competition based on the violation of basic worker rights reinforces the downward pressure on wages and working conditions that the UAW has sought to reverse. China’s entry into the WTO will make inclusion of worker rights protections, and environmental protections as well, into the rules of international trade and investment much more difficult. The UAW will press for the vigorous implementation of provisions added to the PNTR legislation that require reports on worker rights and human rights conditions in China and recommendations to remedy abuses, the effective use of the provisions to prevent surges of imports, a continued commitment to press for the incorporation of worker rights language in the WTO’s rules and needed improvements in U.S. trade laws. While we criticized these measures as ineffective, they at least provide an opportunity to keep issues important to UAW members and all American workers on the agenda of U.S.-China trade relations. We will have to strengthen our own resolve to develop an international base for incorporating these necessary elements of WTO rules; if that effort ultimately fails, the WTO will have demonstrated its rejection of fair rules for fair trade and the already extremely weak support for the organization will evaporate. In this Section:
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