David Sirota

The New York Times reports that “China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since Beijing introduced market forces in the late 1970s.” That’s great news - but here’s the kicker: the new law is “setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories in China.”

So let’s step back and look at this: China takes a step towards social progress - a step to end the systematic workplace and human rights abuses perpetrated on its people by big companies. And the response from Corporate America is threats to pick up and go somewhere else.

This story very clearly indicts all the “free trade will bring social progress” mantras we keep hearing from people like Tom Friedman and the Washington Beltway. “Free” trade deals do not have environmental, labor, wage or human rights protections in them. Because of that, such standards are not global. That means when an individual country decides to try to raise its own living standards, companies can just pick up and go elsewhere. Put another way - this trade policy deliberately serves to encourage economic punishments for countries that try to improve the lives of their citizens.

This, of course, says nothing about the long-term damage our own companies are doing to the U.S.’s image among the world’s people. The Times notes that “representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.” The skirmish “has pitted the American Chamber of Commerce — which represents corporations including Dell, Ford, General Electric, Microsoft and Nike — against labor activists” and Chinese workers.

Think about what that projects to the billion people living in China: America is working to keep you in sweatshops. And yet, the Beltway folks who encourage this behavior still publicly wonder why so many people across the globe hate our guts right now. It’s pretty obvious: when your country endorses behavior that hurts ordinary people, those ordinary people aren’t going to like your country.

All of this is only going to get more important in the years to come. And if we keep pursuing Tom Friedman-style mindlessness on trade policy, not only is our economy going to be in the toilet, but so is our international credibility. The National Intelligence Estimate recently told us that we are creating a “cause celebre” for jihadists in Iraq. And you can bet that our disgusting trade policy written by Beltway lobbyists is unnecessarily creating even more animosity to our country in other parts of the world.

Sirotablog

BLOG ANNOUNCEMENT

Tom Friedmanism Punishes China for Trying to Stop Sweatshops