Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I think it is important, at this point in time, for us to be reminded of the concerns of working people across our Nation.

This has been an intense debate, because so often, in the course of the trade agreements we have pursued, the balance on the other end has been simply that millions of jobs have left this Nation.

We have lost 5 million jobs and 50,000 factories. That is a tremendous loss for workers across the States seeking for the foundation of successful families because there is no government program that can compare to the value of a living-wage job.

What we have seen in the wake of NAFTA and the free-trade agreements that have followed is not only a tremendous loss of jobs but a tremendous increase in inequality in this Nation.

Now, we have heard the opinion of some that this is a completely different structure and that we should not be concerned about this being the result of this particular agreement, this particular set of standards, that are going to be brought back to us in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I disagree, and I disagree deeply, and I am going to tell you why.

Let's start with the most fundamental issue on level playing field, which is wages that are roughly comparable.

The old agreements have no minimum wage. This agreement has no minimum wage. We are creating a structure of a group of seven very poor nations with very low wages, five affluent nations with higher wages. Think about the difference between running an operation in Vietnam or Malaysia or Mexico with a minimum wage of less than $2 per hour and in Vietnam a minimum wage of only about 60 to 70 cents, depending on what part of the country you are in.

Think of the difference between that and the minimum wage in the United States. It is a 10-to-1 differential. If you throw in the type of benefits and the labor standards and the environmental standards, it is a differential of probably at least 20 to 1. That is why we are losing jobs in manufacturing. Now, is there anything that puts a minimum wage into this agreement and addresses this key missing factor? There is not.

Then let's turn to the rest of the labor and the environmental objectives that are embedded. We have heard a lot that we are now going to have enforceable environmental standards and enforceable labor standards. But the fundamental structure disagreement is the same as agreements we have had before.

Now, I applaud my colleagues who are working to tighten the enforcement on cheating on tariffs. That is important. But those are not enforceable labor standards and those are not enforceable environmental standards.

Therefore, we can look back at the history of similar agreements and say: When did we ever bring any sort of action on environmental standards government-to-government?

The answer is: We have not.

When did we ever bring a complaint on labor standards?

The answer is: We have done it once. We did it in Guatemala. That was 7 years ago. We still don't have any resolution of that single complaint, that single challenge.

So in order to have something that was fundamentally different, we would have to have something like snapback tariffs--a situation where a country deeply violated its promises on labor standards, deeply violated its standards or promises on environmental standards, and that there be some sort of quick and certain reversal of the benefits of trade agreements, but there is nothing like that in this agreement. There is no change.

So here we are, repeating the same basic structure that has existed in the other agreements, with no changes for America and therefore no improvement for the workers of the United States of America.

Now, there are objectives that have been placed into fast-track, but those objectives require an agreement to come back with areas to be addressed, such as human rights and so forth that have been much vaunted. Those are objectives. Those are not standards.

If we were serious about saying what an agreement had to have in it to come and get the privileges of fast-track, we would have converted those objectives into standards. That was one of the amendments that we never debated on the floor of the Senate, so we never wrestled with this deep deficiency.

Then, of course, we have the investor-state dispute settlement portion of this, and we have been affirmed here that we normally win when we are challenged. And that is correct--we have mostly won when we are challenged. We have won because we have out-lawyered the other side because, in general, we don't expropriate. But we have not won under all the trade agreements.

We lost a case on tuna that was dolphin-free or dolphin-friendly tuna labels. Why did we lose it? Because under the WTO, Mexico challenged it. Under WTO, they challenged it and said: This discriminates against the way we fish, and we lost. We lost on turtles. We lost on cotton.

What happened last week? Well, we lost on the labeling of food grown in the United States of America. The WTO said we cannot label our beef as USA made or raised or born or harvested.

I tell you this. I want to live in a country where, if our legislators, at the local level, at the State level, at the Federal level, want to pass a law that informs every citizen about where food is grown because the citizens want to know, it should be possible to do so.

We should not give away our sovereignty to international panels that can make decisions that wipe out our consumer laws or our environmental laws--and there was a proposal to make sure we did not end up with that in this agreement, and it was defeated.

So we still have this substantial risk of losing future cases, just as we lost on dolphins, just as we lost on turtles, and just as we lost last week on the labeling of food in the United States of America.

This particular issue of labeling our food goes to the heart of who we are--free people who want to make decisions for the health and safety of our families. The way we do that is when we buy things, we find out information, and that information has to be on the label.

I was reading here earlier an article about how shrimp is raised in Vietnam. It is farmed in pools, and it doesn't meet any of the standards we would like, so they get artificial documentation and it is shipped at high volumes into the United States. Consumer Reports came out with a report recently, and they said: Don't buy shrimp unless it is produced in the United States, particularly don't buy it if it comes from Vietnam.

There is another example of why we should, if we want to be able to, have labels on our food that say ``Made in America'' or ``Made in Vietnam.'' Consumers should have a choice, so they can see Consumer Reports and find out that shrimp is full of deadly bacteria, when they receive Consumer Reports, and find out that shrimp is full of antibiotics that are put in because of deadly bacteria, and they don't want their children exposed to those bacteria. If they don't want them exposed to bacteria, they should be able to make that decision, but we can't do that if we give away our sovereignty to international dispute resolution panels.

So there are a host of problems inherent in this trade agreement and in this fast-track that have not been resolved.

We have not addressed having a minimum wage and steadily over time reducing the disparity between the lowest paid countries and the highest paid countries so our workers will not be at this massive disadvantage.

We have not addressed the enforcement of labor provisions because we have not developed anything different from what we have done before, and we are unable to enforce them. We have only tried once, and we are still out after 7 years with Guatemala. We haven't even tried with the environmental side, it is so difficult.

We have left intact an international panel of corporate lawyers who on one issue can be the advocate, on the next can be the judge. It is full of conflict of interest. We haven't addressed that.

So here is the bottom line: Do we want to live in an America where the middle class is going to be wiped out because we have pulled out all the barriers between very low-wage countries, low-enforcement countries, low-labor-standard countries, low environmental standards, and our economy--which then creates tremendous pressure for our own wages and standards to diminish. Why does it create pressure? Because companies say: You know what. If you push for higher wages or better working conditions, we are going to move our factory overseas or they say: You know what. We already have a factory overseas. We are going to increase our production there and decrease our production here. That is the pressure here on wages and working conditions in the United States of America.

What about the people overseas? This agreement is designed so companies who are producing in China--which will not be part of the agreement at this point in time--can say: If you raise your wages and your working conditions, we will go to Malaysia, and if Malaysia raises theirs, we will go to Vietnam.

So it isn't good for the foreign workers any more than it is for the American workers.

There was an article yesterday in the Washington Post. The columnist or the op-ed writer said: It is basically like this. This agreement is, like previous agreements, very good for the investor class. Because if companies can produce things at the lowest possible cost, that will raise their stock prices.

However, he said, it is really bad for the working class because less and less will go to the workers under these types of competitive pressures between the United States or taking the work overseas or between one nation overseas and another nation overseas.

So I will conclude this simply by saying: This is why I voted against this fast-track, because this fast-track is deeply flawed. It does not address the fundamental issues that have been identified in previous agreements. Going down this track and bringing the Trans-Pacific Partnership to this Chamber, with no ability to mend it, no ability to extend debate because debate will be limited, no ability to hold it to the normal standards in the Senate in terms of closing the debate--because of all that, this is simply the wrong direction to go.

In this final effort, in this final set of time before we take the final vote, let's recognize it is important that we, as Senators representing the citizens of the United States, not simply fight for the investor class; let's fight to make work work for working Americans.

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