Rep. Kucinich Presses for Worker Rights Agenda at World Trade Organization Meeting to be Held This Week in Seattle, WA

Washington, DC --- U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Cleveland), in Seattle, Washington this week to monitor the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Ministerial meeting, is leading a congressional coalition call for conditioning trade relations with the United States on worker rights. Last week Kucinich organized a letter to President Clinton from 113 House Democrats -- more than half the Democratic members in Congress -- expressing support for conditioning trade relations with the U.S. on worker rights and criticizing the WTO for prohibiting efforts to enforce worker rights. Kucinich is attending the Seattle WTO meeting with Ohio congressional colleagues Marcy Kaptur (D-Toledo) and Sherrod Brown (D-Lorain).

"I will work this week to defend American workers and their jobs, particularly in the key automobile, steel and aerospace industries," said Rep. Kucinich. "I am a strong critic of the WTO, especially for its role in a ‘race to the bottom’ in setting workers’ wages, labor and safety standards, and environmental standards."

The Kucinich letter urged the Administration to renegotiate existing WTO agreements to remove prohibitions on linking trade with worker rights before any new trade agreements can be negotiated. That could spell trouble for WTO accession for China and any new WTO agreement in a Democratically-controlled Congress.

"Trade with the U.S. should be conditioned on worker rights," said Rep. Kucinich. "Imports to the U.S. must be made without child labor, by workers who enjoy the right to organize into unions and bargain over wages and working conditions, high workplace safety standards, and a legal minimum wage. If the WTO prohibits that, then the WTO must change."

The Kucinich letter called upon the Administration to amend existing WTO agreements to remove prohibitions on linking trade and worker rights. The letter stated that: "Before any new WTO agreement is negotiated, we urge the Administration to... [renegotiate] existing WTO agreements to explicitly enable the U.S. and other countries to prohibit import of products made with child and forced labor, and to use the leverage of access to the U.S. market and other markets to guarantee the rights to workers to organize into unions and bargain collectively; to be protected by workplace safety and right-to-know standards that are minimally equivalent to current U.S. standards, and to benefit from legal minimum wage levels."

The strong showing on the Kucinich letter could spell trouble for House approval of the recently announced agreement to bring China into the WTO. On Monday, November 15, the Administration announced it had concluded negotiations with China over its membership in the WTO. The Kucinich letter clearly states, however, that before any new trade agreement is brought before Congress, the Administration should renegotiate existing WTO agreements.

The appointment of Kucinich as a leader on trade issues to the WTO meeting is his fourth such appointment in the past year. Kucinich had most recently joined a bipartisan coalition of Members of Congress which met in April, 1999 with Russian leaders in Vienna, Austria to discuss a framework for a peaceful resolution to the war in Kosovo and Serbia, a framework which was subsequently adopted by G-7 nations; he was one of two Democratic House Members asked to monitor the worldwide meeting on global climate change in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and he had also served as a congressional monitor to a United Nations conference in New York on Y2K-related issues, which attempted to raise awareness in the international community of the need to address and fix computer systems.

Letter to President Clinton regarding workers rights

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